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Comment by gtirloni | Hacker News Reader

Aren't they shipping the chips back to Taiwan for packaging anyway?

There are other US-based packaging - while it's unlikely to be relevant to AMD, Intel does some packaging in New Mexico.

Amkor is building a test and packaging facility in Arizona now, so there will eventually be domestic options.

Even if they are, it’s a positive.

It is potentially worth pointing out that container ships going back to Asia are basically empty, so that return shipping trip is basically free.

I wouldn’t be surprised if air cargo works the same way: outward loads from Asia subsidize inward loads.

I wonder if chips are literally shipped or just flown.

The extra transport cost might not matter for these precious chips. A tray full of Epyc or Blackwell dies is an insane number of potential revenue per kg.

Leading-edge chips are flown almost every time. The opportunity cost of 6 weeks at sea is too high for a chip which can't flow out of the fab fast enough to meet demand.

Shipping the chips back to Taiwan to be packaged so they can then be shipped back to the United States for sale is a positive? What are you talking about?

You can't go all the way in one step. Having built domestic chip capacity is positive for the US, even if domestic packaging capacity isn't there yet. It's obviously not a desirable situation long term.

Shipping is a temporary measure.

What’s positive is that we have state of the art domestic manufacturing with potential to onshore more and more of the required supply chains, building/educating local expertise, etc etc.

It’s silly to focus on shipping.

Ocean shipping is very very cheap. Less cost in money and energy to ship a chip across the ocean than for you to drive to best buy to buy the phone its in.

Significantly more pollution though, right?

It's many orders of magnitude more energy to fab a chip than to ship it across an ocean.

TSMC alone accounts for 12% of Taiwan's electricity demand, and growing fast:

https://spectrum.ieee.org/taiwan-semiconductor ("TSMC’s Energy Demand Drives Taiwan’s Geopolitical Future" (2024))

Sea freight is the least polluting one - due to the extreme amount of cargo. Air is expensive and very pollutant.

However, talking about chips that are hundreds of watts each the pollution produced by them is a lot higher than any transport.

There are moves being made to test ships with modern "sails". Here's a paper published about a cargo ship fitted with 4 sails in 2010. The findings are interesting with it achieving up to 25% better fuel efficiency when using the sails.

https://www.stg-online.org/onTEAM/shipefficiency/programm/06...

No, much less pollution. It costs less carbon emissions to ship from Shanghai to California and back then for one person to drive 10 minutes to the store in their personal car.

But the boat is already going back empty

and then the chips stay in Asia?

then 5 pounds of chips on the way back is worth millions of dollars so it can be flown on a passenger jet or fedex jet that is already going here. or a boat and take up 3% of a container

What about freight trains?

From the US to Taiwan? I mean if Elon Musk want's to build a hyperloop through a sea floor spreading zone, then sure why not.

The context was truck-based shipping being more expensive than ships. I was thinking Arizona/New Mexico to ports (and vice versa).

It's better (for the US) than if they're made elsewhere, packaged elsewhere, then sold here.

Looking at all of the places in the US that used to make things before those things were made elsewhere, I'd say it's not better for the US.

If that’s the case, do they have to pay tariffs when they re-import them?

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