Hacker News Reader

Comment by jolux | Hacker News Reader

> Would be timely if Western politicians showed same concern for national manufacturing capabilities instead of continuously relying on outsourcing.

You mean like this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHIPS_and_Science_Act

View on HN

The CHIPS act is a big mistake, they decided to give billions of dollars to companies like Intel that decided to layoff thousands of people a few months later. Like always, the US decided to give more money to unaccountable companies that will put this money into their management and shareholder's pockets.

the money was not pro bono, right? Intel has to perform something otherwise they need to pay it back, no?

No, like all schemes created by the US, companies will only accept the money if they know they won't have to repay it back. They just need to show "intention" of investing that money; for example, trying to start a new factory, even if knowing that it will never be operational.

So, which fab in your opinion will never be operational? Ohio?

It’s remarkable that China even manages to do subsidies better than us. Blanket incentives to an industry would be far better than the regulatory capture we get here… Same story for EVs.

Chinese also have their fare share of subsidy fraud.[0][1][2][3] The most notable of these is probably Wuhan Hongxin Semiconductor Manufacturing, which essentially wasted billions of dollars, a lot of which was funded by the local government.[1][3] FWIW, I suspect China will create EUV machines anyway. While there has been a lot of fraud, there is also a lot of talent in China. And solving an already solved problem is much easier than solving it the first time.

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-65022389

[1] https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/36Kr-KrASIA/Semiconductor-f...

[2] https://www.scmp.com/comment/opinion/article/3206470/greates...

[3] https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-trends/article/3126124/chinas...

(A lot of these sources mention the same incidents, they are not all separate, just wanted to give more than one source)

The money has not gotten paid out yet. Do you think they should cancel Intel’s grants and give the money to proven foundries like Samsung and TSMC?

It also gave a lot of money to TSMC and to the DoD to study and support chipmaking directly, though.

I’m actually excited to see these projects come into fruition. If USA can pull it off, and become competitive in global markets, it’ll a proof that we can still build big projects when we want to. If things go sideways with nothing coming online by the end of 2020s, it won’t look good especially knowing how China just keeps outbuilding us.

Same. I'm pretty confident we can, though. Not to take too much away from ASML who has done a good job in the time since, but don't forget that the US invented EUV with taxpayer money and basically only allowed ASML(and a company they bought) access. And the rest, as they say, is history.

EUV the concept is obvious. You want higher resolution, you need shorter wavelengths. But there are many devils in many details, and the relatively tiny US EUV program didn't do a whole lot about them. So no, EUV is not mainly a US development.

I'm not sure how true that is. The EUV concept was drawn up in the 90s, and the program was designed specifically to do further research to overcome technical hurdles. Multiple companies were interested in licensing this research, but all but ASML were blocked. Is it no coincidence that they are the only ones who achieved it?

In fairness, I don't know all the inner workings of what was already in place and how much more they had to do initially, it just feels peculiar that the denied interested parties(large Japanese companies) never achieved it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com