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Comment by lysace | Hacker News Reader

Yes, roughly speaking 1:4 compared to California.

Edit: This is not news. This (combined with their higher EE education) is why Taiwan won IBM PC-clone-related manufacturing in the 80s. And why they now have TSMC.

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Such a great victory for American industry... the future is to bring workers from Taiwan with skills and willingness to receive a fraction of US salaries.

What are your realistic options?

Say TSMC pays supper competitive US salaries to attract US-only labor, higher labor cost which is causing the end product to be more expensive, which makes that fab uncompetitive globally causing Apple to go buying from someone else and TSMC either choosing leaving the US or going bust eating the losses.

You can't compete with lower-wage countries in a globalized world with no trade barriers and no tariffs, when Apple wants higher profits and consumers want lower prices. Something has to give.

You can put tariffs on imported chips to equalize the field, but then iPhones would be more expensive for the average American and Apple's stock would tank.

So, pick your poison.

> when Apple wants higher profits and consumers lower prices

Trump wants chips that say "Made in 'Merica". I dont think cost comes into it that much.

That's the catch, he said "Made in America", not "Made by American workers" :)

The DoD is the driver. They're freaked out about the supply chain vulnerabilities.

More automation. Given the chemicals involved in fab work in general I expect this fab is very automated just for safety reasons and so very few employees are needed. Thus the cost of labor isn't a significant factor.

>Thus the cost of labor isn't a significant factor.

It is. Semi fabs aren't fire-and-forget. You need highly skilled people to constantly check and tweak all the operations in a feedback loop 24/7 and every hour of downtime due to any issue means millions lost. You hire the right people to minimize that downtime while also keeping the costs in check. It's a delicate balance.

What % of the all fab costs over two decades are the people? Including the cost of building it and modernization

Touché

All money ultimately goes to labor. Rocks don't accept cash as payment.

but not fab's labor.

True, but compared to the amount of production I would guess these are only a few people.

The problem was never the cost of labor. US tech is already highly profitable and they can pay the full salary if they wish to. But their desire is basically to get a free card to pay lower salaries by any means, so they can send more of those profits to shareholders. The US is essentially a fighting arena between shareholders and workers. The profit is there, it is just a matter of how business want to keep always more of the spoils to themselves.

Do you also think that if a business loses money, the employees should give some of their pay back to the business? Or does this just go one way?

Workers ALWAYS give back some of their salaries when a company fails. They either get lower compensation or lose their jobs altogether.

What about the US providing actually good education that can produce workers able to compete with Chinese and other Asian countries?

Why would well educated US grads go work in a semi fab for 50k when they can make 5-10x in an office or at home, getting people to click on ads in the bay area, or move money around between tax heavens in new york?

Your answer explains why the US is creating a failed society. It either implodes or needs to control other countries to maintain its profit and consumption levels.

> You can't compete with lower-wage countries in a globalized world with no trade barriers

I think you’ve correctly identified the solutions.

Rather, sounds like paying the real costs rather than playing games to avoid that.

This solves for the US national security issue; in the event of war between China and Taiwan (and a possible proxy war with US), Taiwan immigration would qualify for asylum.

Would that be the thing that Trump says he wants to stop on day one? Those asylum-seekers? The Trump who is inviting Xi to his inauguration?

You can't really be this obtuse. Asylum of high-skilled silicon workers from an ally under invasion isn't nearly the same thing as the asylum being granted over the last 4 years to anyone who could download the CBP One app.

Trump is inviting Xi as a troll / show of power.

Why don’t you have Elon Musk explain that to Trump’s base who don’t give a shit about Taiwan or H1-Bs

> the asylum being granted over the last 4 years to anyone who could download the CBP One app

This is entirely unmoored from reality. CBP One only allows people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela to make appointments, and once they have one, they have to actually show up and argue their case (why they need to come to the US for their own safety). You can’t just show a border patrol officer that you have CBP One and walk on through.

> This solves for the US national security issue

I mean, maybe it's okay that some other country is better than you at something important. Excuse me but: the arrogance.

OK. Cards on the table.

This is not arrogance. This is not even about China and Taiwan fighting a war. (Heck, that's probably never gonna happen anyway.)

This is about the US manufacturing important things on our own. And it's not just the US either by the way. The Europeans want to be able to manufacture their own chips. The Russians. The Chinese. The Japanese. The Koreans. And on and on and on.

Why? Because the current system is dumb for everyone who is not Taiwan. For a whole lot of reasons. (Most of them economic.) No one wants to say that out loud, but it's the truth. We can't have everyone dependent on chips but only one nation capable of making them. Again, we're not the only ones who have come to this conclusion. Are the Chinese also "arrogant"? Are the Japanese "arrogant"? The Europeans? The Russians? Are the Koreans "arrogant"?

So everyone else can make common sense moves, but it's "arrogant" if the US does the same common sense thing? So we should just keep paying out an increasing share of our GDP as chips become more and more important and expensive while everyone else makes moves to cut their costs right? Is that what we have to do to be considered not "arrogant"?

People need to be a bit more reasonable.

How much does salary contribute to the overall cost of operating TSMC? Perplexity said that the average salary of a TSMC employee is $76K a year, and TSMC had about 80K people. So it cost them around $6B a year on salary. In the meantime, their operational cost was about $46B a year, so that's 13%. TSMC shipped about 16 million 12-in wafers. Each 12-inch wafer can make about 300 to 400 chips. Let's say 200 to stay on the conservative side. That will be 3.2B chips a year. That means the cost per chip on salary will be less than $2 a year. It looks HC cost is not that dominant?

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