The US has basically no domestic component manufacturing, no central hubs of electronics parts distribution, no young talent entering the field, and no new shops entering the market with cutting edge automation/capabilities. And it doesn't make much sense from a financial POV either. A team of one writing an AI wrapper "electronic parts picker" SaaS app will pull more money than a team of 50 building a board house, and they don't need $50 million upfront for capex.
Shipping is extremely cheap these days. You can move any manufacturing you want, if you're determined to do so.
> places the industrial revolution happened
It's still very much there on the map of Europe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Banana
Sure, this works when you know exactly what you want. If you're prototyping or looking for a replacement component, those who can walk/drive to visit 10 potential suppliers' factories in a day have a competitive advantage versus waiting 10 business days for the samples to arrive.
Having a concentration of jobs in one place also results in having a concentration of domain experts in that place; forming a self-sustaining ecosystem. A lot of local governments the world over have tried and failed to replicate Silicon Valley, but without the critical mass of academia, technologists and VCs. Trying to replicate Shenzen without the machinists and injection mold greybeards is equally fruitless.
Apple, and Google could have been formed anyway on earth, but there were advantages of being in Silicon Valley that compounded the growth into the behemoths they are now without worrying about where to source talent.
It's not, it's network effects/economies of scale. Everything is highly automated already.
> We're already seeing some basic techs start to return back to higher-tech, higher-labor-cost countries (like the US Gulf Coast) because of automation improvements.
China is better at automating electronics manufacturing than the United States and has a decade or two lead on us. They also have policy advantages the US can't dream of, like building a new set of factories in 3 years instead of 5-7, with housing for all the workers and centralized water/power/gas utilities. The government is also capable of writing blank checks and forcing the finance industry to fund things that they otherwise wouldn't.
The current administration is not smart or agile enough to address the root causes of the decline in American electronics manufacturing and motivated by individual greed instead of national dominance.
Look at the Chinese auto industry to see how they're able to mobilize sectors much faster than anyone else. The US cannot hope to compete using a 20th century model of globalized economies where we pretend China is only competing with sweatshop labor. That has not been true for 25 years.
It's naive to think that China's politicians are not motivated by individual greed. American politicians are, on average, about as greedy as politicians in other countries.
It's similar in the US. Even modern giga factories employ thousands of people.
Is there a place where I can look up what's being brought up back to North America? Last time I tried searching for it, all I found was:
1) TSMC et al. building big factories over here (which, I think, is a bit different because of subsidies, and realpolitik) 2) People complaining in pro-manufacturing Twitter posts how nobody wants to automate the existing factories