Intel certainly do run machines 24/7 but perhaps those R&D engineers/PhD's don't, so maybe only the techie's running the machines have full coverage...?
TSMC and SMIC are different beasts entirely. They push way harder on the gas and never let up.
A lot of ex-TSMC are at SMIC now. They aren't doing cutting edge nodes for now but expect crazy things out of SMIC in 5-10 years.
Not only do they currently have the largest share of current technologies they are going to be first to market with next-gen batteries too with CATL and BYD both entering mass production of sodium-ion batteries this year. These have lower energy density for now but that will likely chain as improvements land.
Japan and Korea dropped the ball is what happened, it wasn't any singular error but many unforced errors over a good 10 year period that led to them being now substantially behind.
>> Japan and Korea dropped the ball is what happened, it wasn't any singular error but many unforced errors over a good 10 year period that led to them being now substantially behind.<<<
You don't seem to understand the battery market. Japan and South Korea have been in the battery business at lease since the mid 1990's. Japan's manufacturing has declined over time, but LG Chem is the largest EV battery manufacturer in the world. Of course, that's the global market share, outside China -- ie, there won't be any Chinese battery in North America.
This can be pipelined and parallelized to some extent, but then you have to convince enough PhD level employees to do night shifts, because each process step is basically a miniature physics or chemistry experiment that has to be monitored and tuned constantly (at this stage).
It's one thing to make one perfect transistor, it's a totally different ballgame to make 10 billion perfect devices with better than 90% tool uptime, and an essential component of closing that gap is brute force experimentation.