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Comment by dom96 | Hacker News Reader

Why the US? Why not Europe? Ireland or UK?

Probably because Europe is not threatening them behind the scenes and perhaps offering money as well.

Diversifying chip manufacturing more globally is pretty crucial to maintaining the world order though. Sadly, having a fab in the US under the current administration is not helpful to the west in general. Getting TSMC or building an alternative to TSMC in Europe, UK, Canada, Australia, would be very smart.

I believe a lot of the machines TSMC depends on are even produced in Europe, so there should be room to make some deal!

I doulbt anyone will build a factory in Europe. It won't be competitive because of the energy prices on the continent.

You realize that the US buys energy from Canada right? The US has no advantage on energy. Even in Europe, building more power capacity is simply a matter of wanting to.

Right. I do. The US buys a lot of it, and it is cheap.

As for Europe, you are right, partially it's a matter of a mindset, however there are objective reasons for expensive energy. France's access to cheap uranium is almost gone. Europe refuses to sign long-term russian gas delivery contracts and are buying spot which costs arm and leg (whatever is left of it). German power plants are shuttered. LNG imported from the US is very expensive.

Some German CEOs (I think Volkswagen if I recall correctly) said recently that Germany offers no competitive advantage these days. I agree.

Where do you think manufacturing will go? Energy is everything.

However hard it is, the decline of the US is going to force Europe and the rest of the western countries to build out replacements for US labour and goods. The US is simply not a reliable trading partner nor ally under the new administration. Energy will be built.

The US and European alliance was a marriage of convenience. One of the results of Ukrainian conflict was manufacturing moving from Europe to the US. Energy has to be built from something, and Europe does not have it.

Europe has sun and wind. In the time it would take the US to build one nuclear plant Europe can build over 10x as much renewable capacity, for 1/10th the cost. As much as I'm pro environmental protection, the reality is that a lot of places are preferring renewables because they are cheaper and faster to build than traditional power plants for the same energy outputs. Even Texas is building tons of renewables for this reason.

So yes, energy will be built in Europe and elsewhere.

One word: BS. Germany energy shortages were in the news early this year, and last year, and the year before then. See this, for example: https://www.power-technology.com/news/germany-wind-power-sho... Germany and its renewables is just a laughing stock at this point. One cannot run an industry on renewables, and they are finding this out. There was already some talk about restarting nuclear power plants.

With your optimism, they would have tackled this problem already.

Texas already paid its price for their lack of investment in traditional generation facilities.

Here's the real time state of Finland's power grid. Zoom out to the month view. Solar is pitiful this time of the year, and wind is horribly inconsistent. Some days the wind doesn't blow at all and the fossil fuel "co-generation" plants need to be spun up. You can't just ignore the demand for reliable, base load power.

https://www.fingrid.fi/en/electricity-market/power-system/

Its weird to claim that the US is in decline when discussing the EU. The fate of the EU is incredibly intertwined with that of the US. If one is in decline, the other is as well.

The fall of the US will absolutely harm other western countries yes. But we will build and eventually thrive, unlike the US if it remains on its current trajectory.

I'm sorry but that's such an odd statement. One of the reasons people are saying that the US is currently falling or something is because they aren't as keen on defending Europe as they once were. The point is that Europe cannot even realistically defend itself.

Euro nationalism is so weird to me. I can't think of any metric where the US is doing worst (a part from healthcare and other social issues but those have always been worse in the US). Like in what way do you think that Europe is somehow stronger than the US? By the way this is coming from someone who isn't american, it's just weird that you actually think that Europe's trajectory is somehow towards a thriving future but the US is on its way to fail.

I remember the same doom and gloom and boasting from Europeans back in 2016, but it turns out that even with Trump Europe still didn't manage to outpace economically the US by 2020, or 2024. In fact the gap has widened.

Is chip manufacturing particularly energy intensive? I would expect that chip plants are not that price sensitive about electricity, within reason.

It is.

The light source uses a lot of power to produce those few hundreds of watts of radiation

Seems your average semiconductor foundry needs around 100MW[1] to 200MW[2] of electrical power to operate. The main consumption is down to refrigeration chillers[3].

Average US house uses about 12600kWh per year[4], or 1.44kW average across a year. So that means one foundry takes about what 70k to 140k houses would take.

[1]: https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/dotcom/client_serv...

[2]: https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/6/24091367/semiconductor-man...

[3]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02786...

[4]: https://www.eia.gov/consumption/residential/data/2020/c&e/pd...

Prices in the nordics aren't that bad.

It went up considerably because of nordic exports to the rest of Europe. They are producing enough for themselves, but not if they have to share. It's the same reason why US gas prices are somewhat on the high side lately - a lot of it is exported to Europe, and the price differential is large enough to make this worth the trouble.

For any energy intensive industry there is always the option to build new wind and solar for relatively cheap. But labor is cheaper and less regulated in the US and we make it easy to hire skilled immigrants. Having a pro-coal president probably doesn't hurt (but having an anti-wind president might).

I think the bigger reasons are the security and trade issues. The US has embraced protectionism and is withdrawing from security obligations, yet Taiwan requires both US trade and US security guarantees to survive. Unlike with Ukraine, no other powers look capable of filling those roles if Trump keeps pursuing his America First agenda.

1- The US might be (might have been) the only country which would intervene if Taiwan were invaded by China.

2- The US is also the only country which threatens the world with tariffs for political concessions

Maybe TSMC will go to Europe as well, but for now it makes a lot of sense why they choose the US.

Currently everything points in the direction that capitulation would be the outcome of China invading Taiwan, with political pressure to eject any democratically elected leader in Taiwan for the sake of "negotiations".

It was what this administration did in Afghanistan, it's doing in Ukraine, and nothing tells us it will be different with Taiwan.

Because the US will soon have the cheap labor needed to produce them.

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