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Comment by coliveira | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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?

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