It’s not that difficult of a concept. And no, like others will inevitably suggest you can’t just legislate a multinational company to build its facilities onshore because you need them to. If you need something from a company you make it worthwhile, which is what’s happening here.
It’s weird that people have forgotten this is a thing the government can do.
Which would cost the nation more?
a) Setting a modern precedent that any company doing business in the U.S. can suddenly be treated as if they’re somehow owned by the U.S. government and forced to make capital expenditures against their will.
b) A $8 billion subsidy that will eventually be recouped or at least offset by economic benefits.
Pretty much every time we arrange things to favor or necessitate domestic production in an industry, it’s done in the name of security (defense contracting and agriculture come to mind). Including semiconductors in that category is not crazy, and there is certainly more than one way to bring about those incentives.
It's amazing how many people on here seem to think that the first response to China should be to turn the US into China and start doing state-directed capitalism. Maybe "disappear" a few dissident CEOs.
Of course, whether it works or not depends on your leverage as a country: the US should easily pull it off, it's the legislator that doesn't want to play that card for political positioning reasons.
Of course you can. But if you do, you have to accept the consequences.
Again and again people here pretend that just becythe government does it there will be no consequences.
Would $8B be better used for a startup instead of IBM? Or is $8B far too low for a new company.
A more likely scenario is simply that threats and internal political pressure cause Taiwan to ""voluntarily"" unify with the mainland.
$8bn buys you about one (1) fab, but you also need the staff and institutional knowledge to run it, so realistically it has to go to some company that is already operating a similar fab.
And what would the enforcement mechanism be? “Sorry Intel, if you’re not going to play along with our attempt to coerce you into making sure we have a supply of chips then we’re not going to allow you to sell chips here.” Seems a bit self-defeating.