Texas Instruments’ new plants where Apple will make iPhone chips
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
> Unlike the costly bleeding edge 2 and 3 nanometer chips made by giants like TSMC, TI’s chips are made on cheaper, legacy nodes: 45 to 130 nanometers.
What's worse:
> Making chips takes an immense amount of water, and about a quarter of Texas is in drought. Luckily, Sherman has water rights to nearby Lake Texoma.
Indeed lucky for TI, but probably not so for area residents.
Aren’t there plenty of areas where water is ample and land prices relatively cheap.
They already have fabs nearby, and so, fab suppliers/services in the area.
They have a large employee pool in the vicinity, with modest salary expectations.
The southern US mostly doesn't have blizzards and ice that regularly knocks out electric supply lines, and/or makes it impossible for employees to get to/from work for days/weeks at a time.
Water is about the cheapest resource around. Even in water-stressed areas (while it may cost several times what it would in wetter parts of the US) it's still an insignificant expense for any industry that doesn't need an absolutely obscene continual supply.
Roof-top PV solar power works out a lot better in the southern US than further north.
Except for when they do, then they are literally paralyzed until it melts. This may only happen once per decade, bot wow it sucks. One ice storm in Birmingham was so bad kids were stuck at school for 3-4 nights.
This is misleading, modern chip fabs recycle their water basically 100%. It's not being evaporated for cooling like in some data center deployments, it's just part of the process.
> TI will use about 1,700 gallons of water per minute when the new Sherman fab is complete, with plans to recycle at least 50% of that
Lake Texoma has been hovering by the “full” mark pretty consistently for over 55 years. Recently, its water level has significantly declined to—wait for it—100% full!
If you monitor water maps, the east half of Texas’s water supplies don’t often get far outside of “full”.
More data: https://www.waterdatafortexas.org/reservoirs/individual/texo...
Assuming the municipality recycles their wastewater, which they would do in any drought prone region, this water will become clean water again.
It’s essentially a closed system.
Source? Especially the claim that they are using external municipal wastewater treatment seems highly implausible, they are using nasty chemicals.
Are there PFAS chemicals in the semiconductor photoresist and then in the water?
Do municipal wastewater standards require removal of PFAS?
Similarly, they're all okay with dumping water used to wash out coal plants into the rivers: https://www.google.com/search?q=trump+10%25+coal+plant+wash+...
Also you seem to be unaware of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overdrafting
How many bailouts is Intel on now?
The idea of forcing a merger between Intel and TMSC at what could be called be barrel of the gun, would at least make it (indirectly) Taiwan that would have to take over paying for Intel.
It didn't make sense.
Bailout?
Merging Intel and TSMC?
Sorry I am not following.
Where state, employers, and workers collaborate through formal national
mechanisms to collectively manage the economy, prioritizing the needs of the
nation and protecting corporate interests while suppressing labor.How does the Intel thing suppress labor?
Other side of things is you’re absolutely correct that this feels like a fascism, which is what this administration continues to feel like…over and over and over and over again
This is pure hyperbole. I don’t know who told you that any of that is true but they’re taking advantage of your trust.
The deal hasn't actually closed, though, has it? The linked page says, "However, TSMC is unlikely to agree to this proposal."
fixed your typo
/s
Now their xenophobic tendencies against China are stronger.
And that the people responsible for their demise might leave with a parachute the stock holders won't (hi Boeing)
You have likely not experienced it as governments and monetary systems have absorbed these risks (ie. they have moved them elsewhere, hidden away, until some major explosion happens).
Ah, that locus whence political power comes?
[1] Edit to add: This was/is poorly worded - I mean that the US will only guarantee that you remain an ally while they are in some sense dependent on you, and while doing so they may work to break that dependence, which you may interpret as them trying to abandon you.
Right now there is a very large Canadian boycott of US products, services and tourism. I also had to explain to a client this week that because of the import tariffs on Chinese goods to the US the US assembled products are now no longer competitive with alternatives. The fact you were seemingly unaware of this kind of demonstrates the level of effect of it.
We import tons of food and energy from them and have no alternative on time scales or 10 years
If we imported chips from Canada, that supply chain would be safe for at least 50 years, probably hundreds
> We import tons of food and energy from them and have no alternative on time scales or 10 years
More importantly for Canadians that food or energy has no alternative competing market to sell into. Consequently the Canadians are totally dependent on the US market to even set the price of it. This applies to many other sectors as well.
Canada is currently having a huge desperate push to export to non US markets because of the levels of uncertainty that have been created. And I say this as someone not totally dismissive of the US position, but they need to do a far better job of bringing their allies into the tent with them.
I'd say that in any case of a serious Canadian export embargo, it will have been in retaliation to US trade policy or US invasion, not the other way around.
We had essentially no risk that Canada would embargo us, there was no possibility of this happening for the last 150 years until we became the aggressors
That's hubris. Although the US does indulge elective wars, one does not always get to choose with whom one will war.
And we haven't had any serious threats from Canada since 1812. I think the most reasonable estimate is 100-200 years
I could also take the example of world wars, in France ww1 was deemed "la der des ders", which meant "the very last war" or "the war to end all wars", well 20 years later we were at it again
Or simply look at China, you don't even have to go back 100 years in the past to see drastic changes.
I'm not claiming nobody will invade France or Taiwan in the next 100 years, I'm claiming that the US is special. We haven't been invaded since 1812 and haven't really been attacked since 1941. It's reasonable to predict we won't be invaded or go to war with our neighbors for 100 years since it hasn't happened for 213 years
My own death has not yet been a problem for me, but I can safely assume it will be.
Mexico was dealing with its own internal issues (revolution) which made it difficult for them
A slight turn of events and the us would have a huge southern front I deal with, and a base of support for disaffected native Americans and African Americans.
Russia also dropped out of Wwi due to its intern revolution
It is easy to look back and see manifest destiny as a given. There were a lot of contingencies
"War" as a concept does not have to include two militaries fighting each other.
When you stretch the definition of war to absurdity, so can I.
It won't be war. It'll be one-sided trade deals [1,2], and a slow erosion of economic and political sovereignty, culminating in a puppet state.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada-China_Promotion_and_Rec...
[2] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/fipa-agreement-with-china-wha...
There is plenty of risk that our neighbors stop importing and almost no risk they stop exporting
Meanwhile cutting off your markets and wasting hundreds of billions on a long term bet with a small probability that another global war will happen is pretty dumb financial thinking.
Tariffs and corporate welfare will actively make a country poorer and create unproductive zombie markets while raising taxes on everyone. Not to mention diverting budgets and new revenue away from actual national security investment.
Those foundries didn't go away, they're still manufacturing with the same capabilities they used to (and they're much cheaper now since they're competing with the better ones in Taiwan.)
It's good to hear TI hasn't given up on high performance SOCs as it was beginning to look like they had. But most of this stuff is still here. Freescale and many other American companies are still making the same (better even) chips they always have which is more than enough for cruise missiles (more than enough for decent PDAs and smartphones really) even without "stockpiling."
Not to mention China (and/or Taiwan) is still going to want to sell to someone to survive, and those countries can smuggle them into America - just like Russia does for it's drone industry and oil. America is much more capable in that regards with NATO and it's huge purchasing power.
I still think TI and Apple should be investing in foundries and domestically. It should just make sense as a business otherwise it's going to be a very expensive embarrassment.
Even that isn't a given, because unless you have amassed a certain amount of technocratic and governmental competency chances are it can't compete even with government support and you just produce crony dysfunctional companies.
And of course there's economic trade offs. If you're politically ordering your economy to make chips, it doesn't make something else, and whatever it was making and trading for chips it was better at, and so you get fewer chips, that's comparative advantage. Industrial policy (and tariffs) do not increase aggregate production, they reduce it. And given that the circle of items you "can't do without" seems to be a bit of a moving target these days, at some point you're actually more brittle because you've replaced large chunks of the market with state production.
USPS is a great example of an organization that's managed to largely avoid this. Whenever you mention that people crawl out of the woodwork to complain about the 7 different times they lost their package, but their logistics at scale is still unmatched by the private sector, while also not completely negating the value of private sector alternatives (which so often is argued would happen if the government actively started doing anything new).
This is the core economic philosophy behind both the modern centre right[2] i.e. neoliberal democrats (80s-today) and the right wing republican conservatives (pre MAGA -2016).[1]
Even communists would agree this is correct, it is understood in different levels since Adam Smith invisible hand, from far left to centre left just posit that different polices that benefit the people not the economy are worth the cost .
That is actually true for all other groups except anarchists and libertarians all agree government intervention is needed in some form, they just disagree on how .
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Postal services anywhere in the world are inefficient by design. They are governed by universal service obligation principles not efficiency same with telecom providers and other utilities.
The question then becomes how much inefficiency is acceptable given the objectives . There are no right answers, you could have competing private couriers who dump unprofitable low density routes to USPS while serving profitable ones themselves (UPS, fedEX, Amazon ) or you could have gigantic postal service which is sole delivery provider socialist style, there are going to be some problems either way.
It is just matter of preference which set of trade offs we are okay with .
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[1] Post MAGA it is a populist party economically there is no fixed ideology to be characterized
[2] the centre right label is economic and technical to contrast say the socialist left party of FDR/New Deal 1930-70s, not meant to offend.
The problem is however first can we all define the goals consistently and agree on the definition.
Next can we measure the value/benefits of the goal. This is typically subjective so everybody paints the picture best suited to their preconceived ideas.
Finally perception drives the political will for a social program. UBI style programs or just giving money in welfare instead of in-kind benefits for food or healthcare etc or rehabilitation over punishment are more efficient and while shown to work, will rarely get political support because of how they are perceived.
Given that we all have different understanding of the goals, measure them differently and have different moralities on what should be done as society (for welfare, crime etc) and have varying degrees of influence over policy what can we do to approach a problem better
No, it's the opposite. It's a conclusion taken from empirical evidence looking at success rates in the real world. As the US has engaged on its most recent bout of industrial policy, industrial activity has declined, not gone up. Again, this is expected. If you through protectionism make chips and steel in the US inefficiently, everyone in the US using those products as inputs suffers.
There's some limited cases like developing countries engaging in catch up growth , but there's virtually no evidence for effectiveness of these policies in cutting edge technologies, which isn't surprising because they by definition tend to rely on supply chains and knowledge sourced from all across the globe, and to this protectionism is particularly disruptive. And even in developing nations most of the time practices like ISI (import substitution industrialization) fail, it's devastated Latin America in the 1950s to 1980s.
I don't know what USPS proves in this case because it's sustained by a government monopoly. Obviously you could if you wanted privatize mail delivery.
However making everything domestically just isn’t really viable for any country any more. The scale of our technological civilization and the diversity of goods and materials it depends on is more that any one continent can support, let alone one country.
It would be possible to collapse that down to one continent if absolutely necessary, but it would be incredibly economically painful and the US would need to give up on a lot of non-essentials and other priorities to devote resources to duplicating capacity that already exists elsewhere.
Agriculture is self-evident, we need food on a daily basis to live. I don’t need three square microprocessors a day.
You don’t want to wait many years to tool up to make chips that go in weapons, either.
Else, you risk being structurally defeated very early, and this leads to others concluding that they can take you on. It undermines other preparations.
Producing chips and agricultural goods are fundamentally different, starting with limits like climate, seasonality, and land. At most, you could compare it to mining minerals for chip production
It's more to do with similarities in the consequences of not have any local supply in times of emergency.
A. How bad is the consequence of not having them?
B. How long does it take to tool up domestic production if there's a supply disruption?
C. How long can you tolerate the shortage of them?
D. How easy is it for a disruption or disaster to disrupt international supply?
The answers to A and D are fairly different, but both are "bad enough" to trigger this kind of thinking. The ratio of B to C are probably similar between food and critical integrated circuits.
…but the USPS will still use machines with microprocessors to sort that mail.
Having narratives as broad as yours, without any evidence and reasoning, is the fastest way to achieve Russia-level disaster with government monopoly in the name of “security”.
The only sense it makes if you want corruption at state level and to go on war with at least half of the world.
Good luck with that.
Hello from Moscow.
Subsidizing and protecting local production has a cost: there are gains from trade and operating less efficiently makes everyone's standard of living goes down.
But you don't need to go 100% into protectionism. You can ensure that you have enough domestic industry to
- better weather changes and disruptions
- have a starting knowledge and capital base to use to ramp up production if you have to.
Just having a few percent of domestic demand for advanced ICs covered by local production is enough to make the worst international shocks much softer. Critical needs can still get filled. So a certain amount of subsidy can make sense.
Or will some backroom deal be made without any Congressional approval? I got a lot of questions and basically there is no way to get answers since Republicans gave the president: 1. unilateral authority to set tax rates (tariffs and illegal export levies) 1. impound Congressionally appropriated funds on an ad-hoc basis 1. unilaterally close down federal agencies created by Congress
I refuse to debate the merits of this industrial policy while the above three things are true. There is nothing to debate here because no one outside the administration's inner circle (industrialists bribing) who knows what is going on.
I feel like my 7th grade Civics class has been a complete waste. Or, it lets me see what is happening in the correct light.
I would be curious
And now Republicans are ok with impounding Congressionally assigned funds.
So I guess outside of facebook brain rot and doom-scrolling, there is no way to convince voters to vote with policy (requires attention span of more than 30 seconds and high school level reading skills).
Just no idea where to go from here. Feels really dire to be honest.
https://www.politico.com/newsletters/power-switch/2024/09/13...
The real answer is just politics. Blue states have (generally) healthy economies, with a variety of economic actors and many businesses. Businesses often will shop around various states to build a factory looking for tax cuts. The politician can be associated with new jobs, and the business gets a discount, so it appears to be a win-win (if you ignore the lack of tax revenue). No one needs a tax break to start a business in NYC, LA, nor Silicon Valley, so you don’t hear about all the businesses that open there.
Nationally, policies like the IRA are big boosters for the economy, and democrats are focused on getting it done because it’s good for society and the national priorities. They won’t focus on where the money goes, and will allow the money to go to run down republican states as economic stimulus. But you’ll notice it’s usually capital intense factories that end up in these situations, not white collar jobs.
I'm looking at China and what environmental price in the form of polluted land they pay and will be paying for a very long time. The big problems in Western countries also all originated in times with less or no regulation of such things. Just because that's not in the headlines all the time does not mean the problem is any less while the public is not paying attention.
When "it works" and overall success is the only criteria, the Vikings and Mongols surely count as extremely successful. Regulation is meant to take the price into account, in the cases of those two peoples millions of dead and a lot of pillaging and conquering. Regulation is definitely a burden, if you don't have to care about anything but the bottom line it's much easier.
Red states just say they're better for business.
The other reason is that while republican party is purposefully trying to destroy economies of blue states, democrats were not trying to purposefully destroy economy of red states.
Federal funds get funneled to red states to secure the votes of their representatives.
Chip manufacturing factories are traditionally called fabs, short for that.
The actual title of the article used the word "project" not "fabric"
Any reason to use "fabric" here?
So how much ownership is the US gov gonna get in this one?
America is the last place that is short of capital for industry investments where it requires gov taxes going to it, they have a huge domestic financial market and tons of foreign investment (but those require legitimate plans, not national security woo woo). This is just propping up weak megacorp industry like they did with Boeing, instead of fostering real progress.
* The state can't risk taxpayer money on ventures that might not pay off or lose them money. How the state "gets around this" is by issuing zero recourse loans. The advantage is that when economic development money is handed out there's not an asset on the balance sheet. It's treated like it was spent. The value the state gets from spending the money has to be independently worth it for taxpayer without considering financial returns.
* It eliminates a whole category of conflicts of interests where the government will get squeamish regulating or punishing bad behavior because it would hurt the taxpayers' investment.
* It also eliminates vectors for corruption as well as the negative effects of the government having direct influence over specific businesses. No backdoor regulations from the state's ownership stake that don't go through the legislature.
So I'm very heavily in the camp that government shouldn't ever be allowed to have stake in any private company. The line between government and private enterprise should be the wall this admin likes to talk about. I certainly didn't expect it would be republicans I would be trying to convince that state ownership of business is a bad thing.
> So I'm very heavily in the camp that government shouldn't ever be allowed to have stake in any private company. The line between government and private enterprise should be the wall this admin likes to talk about.
> I certainly didn't expect it would be republicans I would be trying to convince that state ownership of business is a bad thing.
The Ohio government works around this by cooperating with private “development corporations.”
It’s not all that different from development tax incentives which are very common.
I think the grants had some requirements to build up domestic production.
And this comes from a place of love... My family's been invested in GSI for almost 100 years
calculators have consistently been a minor percentage of TI’s business (~5% of profits per source below). I doubt MSP430s in particular amount to a huge percentage either
one random source: https://www.meta-calculator.com/blog/ti-graphing-calculator-... (this is pretty easy info to find)
Also... revenue, profit and margin are all different things.
the person above made an analogy —- they didn’t claim TI loses money per calculator
My point is, the statement "calculators and MSP430s for remote power meters are keeping TI from closing up shop" isn't based in reality. Both of these products are tiny parts of their business. If that's all you know of TI, you don't know TI. Like thinking McDonald's is an ice cream shop and completely being ignorant of the burgers and fries, saying those ice cream cones are keeping McDonald's from closing up shop.
Even for the MSP430, it's a small product line of their wireless and microcontroller products.
They make important chips and many top of the line products of their segments but they're not things like server grade CPUs or GPUs.
But... everyone seems to think TI will be competing with TSMC's and Samsung's small-node parts. And they probably could, but they would need to a) build a fab that can make 5 or 3nm parts and b) build a sales channel for new parts. I was alive in the 2000s so remember TI doing an exceptionally poor job of step b.
It's a better story than your misleading statements acting like TI only makes calculators and old microprocessors and flat out inaccurate ones about profit margins.
Luckily…