Thanks, this is interesting to read!
If what you're saying is true, it's a bit sad that all these large-capex industries that are so important for society to have expertise and progress in are not considered promising or competitive.
If what you're saying is true, it's a bit sad that all these large-capex industries that are so important for society to have expertise and progress in are not considered promising or competitive.
AMD EPYC would not have existed if AMD was stuck in the fabrication and packaging space because they wouldn't have had the money to spend building a dedicated design team, and Nvida's breakthroughs in GPUs would have never happened if Nvidia had to also fabricate and package.
A company cannot have every single subsegment of an industry - it's unrealistic and a bad use of capital.
And high capex low margins industries are bad for workers from a salary perspective. This is why CS became so popular in comparison to EE/CE - the starting salaries are easily 2x as a SWE compared to working as a Fab Engineer.
And it's not a simple question of raising salaries. Becuase margins are very low (within the low double digits at most), a foreign competitor like TSMC, Samsung, and UMC can win by paying peanuts - which is what they did. Engineering salaries at those companies in Taiwan and SK are around $40-70k with 996 hours de facto enforced (and why Samsung employees globally are on strike right now)