If Intel is critical to the US industrial base, why aren't Nvidia and Apple stepping up to support Intel? What is the point of $3T national champions like Apple and Nvidia if they ship the industrial base overseas.
Imho it's pretty likely that this will happen. Intel's IP will be sold off, while their manufacturing business remain, both due to the geopolitical situation and because although they have seen setbacks in recent years, they are still damn good at making chips.
This effect is more obvious in small countries, but large ones are not immune to it either, especially if their fortunes turn.
Is it the role of a for-profit public company to "support" another for-profit public company?
Free market, supply and demand, live by the sword die by the sword and all that.
If Intel made decisions that lead to it's downfall, surely that is on them.
It is (or it can be) if you want to avoid antitrust lawsuits. Same reason Microsoft bailed out Apple in the 90s.
Not to mention that Apple had atleast a salvageable IP if done well. Nobody else could compete with them on shipping MacOS machines. Intel has no such moat.
Apple used to dual-source their chips from Samsung/TSMC before they went all in with TSMC, but it's clear they're now vulnerable to geopolitical tensions.
Kind of. If Intel keep making shit, it doesn't help anyone if they succeed doing it. They are nothing making products that are a viable alternative to TSMC, so it makes no difference if they vanish.
They support lowest cost manufacturing in China even when those suppliers have been proven to have stolen the tech (free R&D!) with state support.
It's the microcontrollers and FPGAs controlling weapons systems that really should be made within the country boundaries and that should be completely fine on GF's machinery.
Also, the military semiconductor supply chain is already protected and has serious export restrictions, you just don't hear about it often.
Don't forget that today's leading edge nodes are tomorrow's trailing edge, so you really can't escape the issue.
There's been a continual drive towards better semiconductor processes. That's really important for things like GPU compute. I think we're past diminishing returns for a lot of other things. There's probably a ~14nm arm chip in the keyboard I'm typing on that's only there because it was the cheapest option. Does the ECU in a car benefit from being sub 7nm? Maybe, probably not by much.
That's the special thing about leading semiconductors: they enable other technologies. From the personal computer to IoT and AI, all of these were at some point enabled by advances in semiconductor scaling.
You're only focused on what leading edge nodes provide today, but they enable much more than just speculative AI hyperscaling in the long term.