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Comment by njovin | Hacker News Reader

I would love to see a list of commitments that corporations and foreign bodies have made to investment in the US, and how they've actually played out over time.

They made a similar commitment in 2018 [1] and 2021 [2], but I can't find any info about whether they actually followed through and whether the projected job numbers were accurate.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/17/apple-announces-350-billion-...

[2] https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/apple-announces-430-billio...

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A memorable one was Foxconn https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/21/foxconn-mostly-abandons-10-b...

> Foxconn will reduce its planned investment to $672 million from $10 billion and cut the number of new jobs to 1,454 from 13,000

There's plenty of positive examples including TSMC in Arizona, Samsung in Texas, etc:

https://www.azfamily.com/2025/04/29/tsmc-breaks-ground-third...

https://pr.tsmc.com/english/news/3210

https://www.techtimes.com/articles/311514/20250728/tesla-tap...

TSMC in Arizona flew in many people from Taiwan due to shortage in local labor

I'm glad they're doing what it takes to bootstrap the operation. What TSMC does is highly technical and no doubt there will be a ramp up period to build up the labor pool and talent.

Neither TSMC in Arizona or Samsung in Texas were promises made to the Trump admin though. TSMC was announced in May 2020 (tail end of Trump 1) and Samsung was November 2021.

I don't think GP was saying "no one invests in the US," but rather that these particular announcements clearly designed to appease POTUS do not come to fruition.

I think we all know the answer to that.

Funniest one is Masayoshi Son announcements, in 2016 - $50B for 50k jobs, and in 2024 - $100B for 100k jobs !

2016: https://www.cnbc.com/2016/12/06/trump-says-softbank-will-inv...

2024: https://www.cnbc.com/2024/12/16/softbank-ceo-to-announce-100...

Funny thing here is, that he doesn't even have that money. But who cares these days...

You gotta pump those numbers up. Those are rookie numbers in this racket.

I myself, $1T for 100 million jobs.

Does it matter? Even if nothing gets built both sides are getting what they want.

Yes, because the theater effectively deceives a large portion of the voting public. "Both sides" here are the least important players in the charade. It's everybody they are hosing I care about.

No large portion of the voting public is paying any attention to this.

And most who are paying attention are in it for the vibes. They don’t know enough about trade, economics, international relations or policy to really have an opinion independent from “my side good, other side bad”

Not sure - stock market is at all time high, and valuation are above dot com bubble levels. So I think people are actually paying attention and are getting deceived.

This would also be true if people were just mindlessly dumping cash into S&P500 funds in their 401k.

Partially true, but the valuation would be much more spread out across the components of S&P500, whereas currently they are extremely concentrated in a handfull of names, and a handfull of others (the ones that CEOs are deceiving the public the most) have sky high valuations without being in any index.

But that's what the voting public wants! They demand to be lied to. The feedback loop is problem announced on Fox news / Truth social -> presidential announcement -> positive coverage on Fox/Truth. It's not like the factory actually has to exist for them to be happy. And if they didn't want to be lied to they wouldn't seek out news sources which lie to them and leave them on in their homes constantly.

> It's not like the factory actually has to exist for them to be happy.

If the factory exists it will be ugly, noisy, shit jobs, exploitative, evil bosses, turning the neighbourhood into a slum, etc. People are happier without it existing.

You say that as if Fox News is the only media org that deceives its viewers. There is a reason that American trust in the media is at an all-time historic low.

THIS. I think making promises and not actually delivering completely has been a very common strategy (not judging) for many companies for some time.

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