Intel to get $3.5B infusion from U.S. gov't to make chips for military: Report | Hacker News Reader

Intel to get $3.5B infusion from U.S. gov't to make chips for military: Report

tomshardware.com

31 pointsrbanffy23 comments

Are there enough qualified people available to hire in the US for this? Unemployment rate for electrical engineers is very low.

Chip making is a highly specialized field where you need access to global talent. US work visa/immigration system is capricious and isn't easy to work with.

There are way too many computer scientists coming out of the college pipeline, it'll be very easy for those engineers to pivot to the semiconductor field. Additionally, on the manufacturing side, semiconductors are in principle pretty similar to biotech and biologics pharma maufacturing (many discrete unit operation skids, cleanroom environment, lots of documentation, etc) and i'm seeing lots of automation and manufacturing companies pivoting to semi-conductors.

it won't be 100% efficient, but where the money goes, the talent will follow pretty quickly.

AFAIK, salaries for electrical engineers are very low compared to software engineers so there isn't much interest in working on EE problems. Unless it's your passion and you're willing to give up a good salary.

I think there are a lot of ECEs that work in software. A lot of my classmates from my EE undergrad went to software despite getting a more hardware centric education because software was offering more money.

I imagine there are many people people that, if they pay was higher, would move back to more 'pure' EE/ECE work.

It's a good question. Part of the reason TSMC's plant in Arizona can't get going is because local unions block them bringing over skilled personnel from Taiwan.

I'm assuming Intel took the contract because they already have the capacity to fulfill it.

You have to start somewhere. If the US wants to get the supply chain back (which it foolishly gave away for a short term boost in corporate profits) it's gonna have to do what the economies that took the supply chain away did and start making public investments in it.

Honestly I feel like an idiot living in a country that pretends free trade is still a thing while other countries are building healthy productive industries with state interventionism. In 20 years half of europe will be industrially dead, yes, even more so than today. We won't even be making our own bricks.

Why should we? Bricks will be built in low-cost countries. Tech and science will come from europe.

It honestly doesn't make sense. Call me a conspiracy theorist, but sometimes the stupidity coming from both sides in government is so obvious I have to believe it is intentional.

It feels like our country is being prostituted economically -- foreign aid, welfare, corporate welfare, endless wars and foreign intervention, millions in earmarks to promote perverse ideologies, preventing municipalities from offering high-speed Internet as a utility despite ridiculously successful examples like Chattanooga, all to maintain Comcast's and AT&Ts monopoly on those services.

It's too much...

Mercantilist policies don't work when everyone is Mercantilist. I agree there needs a stronger policy of reciprocity in free trade states against mercantilist ones, but we are doing already in recent years. But if we all close our markets against each other, we can look forward to greatly reduced growth not just at home but everywhere.

Moving up the value chain. It's normal. Until international costs start evening out, exporting commodity manufacturing is normal. Lots of stuff coming from IMEC, and ASML's license of US EUV tech makes them pretty protected for next few years.

I hate how cynical I am, but this feels like abdication. "We can't compete, so we turned to Uncle Sugar for a lifeline" Surely it's an anti-signal? I used to hold INTC proudly and loved the Andy Grove era of that company.

Has Intel become a zombie company?

That is a little overly cynical, but from not knowing the whole story.

The dod has been trying to get away from IBM (!) since before they sold their fabs to glofo. Intel has in fact resisted making defense chips because they are not profitable like commercial endeavors. But the (dod's) need for advanced processes which only Intel has (in the us) and the funding from the chips act is finally enough.

Dear God, we just gave them $20B in cash up front, supposedly to build a foundry in Ohio that will never open because it cannot be staffed -- what is even going on here?

Sounds like exactly what's going on in Arizona with TSMC.

Unions have already figured out that foreign workers will need to staff it and will make everything from construction to operations near impossible. Which is incredibly shortsighted - you need the job demand before you can create the training demand and the skills in the country to train them to make it feasible for Americans to work there.

Those foreign workers are already here in the US getting their educations. We can either incorporate their knowledge and skills into growing our industry here or we can send them back to their home countries to do it there.

Seems an obvious choice.

What American is going to train at university for a job they have to go to Taiwan for? I’d say very few. Seems like good economic policy to kick start this fab.

There's absolutely no reason American workers couldn't be trained, other than capitalists being too cheap to pay for training.

Having skilled workers in an economy is a matter of having a skills pipeline that takes about 20 years to build. It starts by making industries exciting places for school leavers to think about their education, the accessible training programs and university places where they can learn to do it, and of course, somewhere to work. Now, the government is stepping in and creating the demand for those jobs. Good union & education policy should be getting people in those university places.

This isn't just a "sit in a class and learn" thing. While the American workers are being trained the plant will haemorrhage money as yields are bad. This kind of shortsightedness is a classic rent-seeking strategy by unions. But that's normal, union leaders are always fighting the last war. Additionally, they serve present workers, not people who could be workers.

After all, employers would rather choose local workers since they're way easier to get. The problem is that you need to run the plant effectively. You can't do that with a 100% untrained workforce. You need a skilled workforce that you can then augment locally as you scale. You need to build the pipeline, but that takes time and you need to be alive during that time to succeed.

This kind of "it's the filthy capitalists" is just that brand of online ranting that has always been popular. It's not interesting because it barely attempts to look at causes. Filthy capitalists would rather make money than spend 3x as much and take 2x as long to build a plant. Time is money. Especially literal now with high interest rates.

Same thing as always. Cash grab pols making it rain on their pals.

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