America’s semiconductor boom [video]
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https://reddit.com/r/Semiconductors/comments/1m96m4f/my_expe...
Translation: Unions got in the way of actually efficient construction so they had to bypass them with their own people.
Unions in the US, in general, are extremely luddite as any new technology improvement that's better is treated with hatred because it removes jobs from the union's control. This is how the longshoremen have basically permanently prevented any technology improvement at our ports because they refuse to accept any automation and lobby heavily to prevent it.
In general though that post just comes off of "disgruntled former employee who doesn't understand high-intensity work cultures".
It works with everything in a capitalist system too - all production, resources, and outputs of a society that allows unchecked greed, will grow until it stops due to market consolidation (not always nefarious either). Google search as an example, we all picked it first, then they got greedy - even if they were saints that always was going to play out like that, bc of capitalism.
Once a market is controlled by a few players - ALL TRUE GROWTH STOPS and bare minimum, most cost effective to profit ratio "limited/controlled/planned" growth follows.
Hard drives for my adult life are my singular example. Lots of tech is like that actually.
Capitalism without competition will naturally evolve into full on Feudalism and Serfdom if it is allowed to.
With micro chips, 1 company has all the companies by the balls - nobody likes that, so this is a bit different bc there is also room for several companies "Top level" chip manufacturers - for sure more than 1, so although it seems like that industry proves me wrong - it also proves me exactly right also.
Think about the demand for graphic cards with a lot of ram right now for an example - ALL PF EVERYONE knew we needed more than 8gigs of ram last generation but they still rolled out them this generation and there are still even smaller 4gb cards being made - look at an HP or Dell desktops or laptops, look at Gamepass now, so much evidence of the exact formula I described - bc it's like a rule, we just didn't have enough "East India Trading Companies" and couldn't see enough of the whole picture of capitalism, before we all globally started thinking in that mindset.
Capitalism doesn't give a fuck about innovation or quality or providing or services, or the 3 ps - only money. All of us are going to start understanding this in self evident ways as our lives continue - unless we pivot.
It's a good example of capitalism that kinda works right now - but, it could easily be the opposite... if China did takeover Taiwan, that company could easily (would likely very aggressively) do exactly all the late stage capitalism, death to innovation, money machine stuff that I've been describing - as almost/all other companies have done so with similar market positions.
tl;Dr: The only reason they are still making such good stuff is bc they needed/still need to be the silicon shield.
You mean: Capitalism is luddite at the individual level. At the aggregate level, it's the opposite.
> in a capitalist economy all participants are always incentivised to grow as large as possible
As opposed to...?
> Once a market is controlled by a few players - ALL TRUE GROWTH STOPS
I'm not trying to be insulting but I think you need to read a bit more about the world before capitalism. Before the Renaissance Italian and Dutch innovations in banking, company ownership, etc.
Eventually, making a game without a subscription model will not accepted by the distributors (Xbox, Epic, Steam) and games will be made with tiers of subscription play, from conception and the drawing on up - not like DLC now, bc it couldn't be the way it will be until now - bc one player/a small number of companies have so much control.
Today money is power - power like the royal power even, so capitalism today, being late stage, will solely become about exploitation as the powerful and wealthy become further away away from the innovations, they will support innovations less and less, etc.
I don't know, I think capitalism is super broken, and now that it is broke, it can only get more broken and nobody will ever catch up to those benefiting from it being broken now - mostly just bc they were rich at the right time too. The pandemic addition of wealth to the top 1% as examples - they are all already like batman and tony, all researching life extension and blah, blah - tbh, I think everyone can understand this.
Tradeoffs.
That’s what my Canadian passport is for, I can just go back home if I get cancer
I actually first heard about it from the Acquired podcast, which is another great example of that same trend.
[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/ts...
More likely he compared the 4nm yield to the 3nm yield in Taiwan?
I would think there should be plenty of traffic going through there to Taiwan, similar to the amount going through a hub such as Chicago or NY.
PHX was the 11th-busiest airport in the United States in terms of passenger boardings and 35rd-busiest in the world in 2024. The airport serves as a hub for American Airlines and a base for Frontier Airlines and Southwest Airlines.
> It will initially have a water recycling rate of around 85 percent, with a goal to achieve 90 percent. Currently, the company’s water resource center has an efficiency rate of 65 percent, converting industrial wastewater for use in the company's operations.
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/tsmc-breaks-groun...
Some pictures (provided by Intel) from inside: https://semiwiki.com/forum/threads/chinese-media-given-tour-...
There was a big layoff a few months ago, maybe that lines up with the parent comment: https://www.azfamily.com/2025/07/15/records-intel-lay-off-ne...
Don't see much mention of Fab 62 from any source. Did it get the axe, "postponed", or kind of on schedule?
But I guess that's a risk they knew they were taking.
The time of government officials and civil servants ain't free.
Intel failed at finishing a bunch of milestones so there was a large pot of money Intel did not get. Trump gave them that pot of money in return for 10% stock.
You can make up your own mind about whether investing money into a company that couldn't achieve milestones is a good idea.
If you consider it a hedge against missiles flying in the indo-pacific.
I don't know that I would but the US gov could - it's similar in terms of strategic goals as the Jones Act.
However, now that the navy is out of the business of buying overpriced ships to rent out (with the idea that they'd be repurposed if a war broke out) now the Jones act isn't very effective.
However, unlike the Jones Act there's no criteria that Intel be able to supply chips. At least with the Jones Act we're going to have US citizens practiced sailing ships. With the stock purchase Intel doesn't need to have capacity to build chips for missiles/drones/etc; especially with the government treating them as non-voting shares!
If the USG wanted a hedge they should've just forked some money over for an option to buy X chips for $Y. Or some more complex option about fab time / output. You hedge production concerns with futures not equity!
It's also not great to hedge by using a vendor that wasn't able to meet previous goals you gave them. Counterparty risk is a real thing.
It's investigative on-the-ground reporting of the TSMC plant in Arizona, and the recent SemiCon West conference.
To take your photolithography example though, I know someone who went litho tool owner -> camera team at Apple -> Meta reality labs. FAANGs want semiconductor process engineers just so they can spend all day yelling at underpaid Asian vendor semiconductor process engineers who are doing the actual work.
Hell, the only two people I see in this thread that claim hardware experience are saying that it's a better career move to switch to software.
Software is easier, pays better, and has far better employers. Until hardware companies realize the situation they've created, they will lose their workforce to greener pastures.
I’m pretty sure the USA would do fine in the semiconductor industry in a short while if it was economical (i.e it stops being profitable to undermine American workers with cheap overseas labor).
https://www.economist.com/the-world-if/2017/07/13/a-world-of... (https://archive.ph/TFS4G)
Not just net benefits when you include the foreigners, but also just netted over natives.
You guys are very selective, either not even bothering with links, or carefully selecting that one particular piece of paper supporting your PoV. Which of course looked at only very few if not even just a single variable, and (by necessity) failed to account for the breadth of reality.
Quoting single papers is always a sign of desperation. That's not how anything works, when given a broad question. Studies are extremely specific! In comparison, the question here is as broad as it can possibly get for an economics question.
Discussions such as here are only worthwhile when the parties don't care about "winning" and use debate club methods.
Frankly, it’s shitty work. Software is where it’s at. Hardware people get paid peanuts and work really hard. When you’re a master of a particular technology, you get discarded when the next thing comes along. Ask the people at Intel or IBM. The best jobs are the execs and the tradesmen.
Gamers are still buying them and so is everyone else
Given that this is the same curiosity and question since pre-pandemic and now we have many examples of a premium, I think its not a real worry as long as the chips perform
"China needs the American market because they can't make up the numbers for the rest of the world combined in the short term"
Can people here help answer where the heck does everyone have the money to buy all this stuff? Especially post COVID with all the layoffs? The US is only 5% of the world population. Europe isn't that poor and many chunks of Asia have a lot of wealth now. Yet America's appetite and more importantly capability of absorbing all manner of goods remains unimpaired...how?!
Its a long answer but there are many winners in every financial environment in America, while the short answer is that nobody knows how they have money en masse to buy stuff
and the whole system is based on incentivizing them to move that money around the economy, as opposed to collect and save it in a bank account
Literally this.
Median household income in America is US$8,000 per month.
Half of Americans make MORE than that.
And 2.5 Americans per household will say “they make more than that”
Kids say “my dad is rich” and wives say “we make $70k/month”
The thing is that WW2 decimated most of the advanced economies outside of the US, and for decades afterwards many of them simply weren't managed for growth (i.e. the Soviet bloc). So the US had a huge head start and never stopped running. To this day you still don't really see many other countries being as fixated on juicing consumer spending as the US is. The big play of the last few decades has been all these emerging economies getting good at exports and making a lot of money that way, which has cut into the US' lead, but once they have the money they tend to be less aggressive about getting it circulating internally - it accrues to a fairly small number of people and/or they just sit on a lot of it.
Add on moralizing about how people should be making and not spending and you've got yourself a recipe for an export-oriented slowdown, since at some point the world won't be wealthy enough to keep raising your economy through only exports. We saw this in Japan, South Korea, and more recently Germany and China.
The US economy is doing fine.
Europe is that poor and while lots of Asia has wealth not by comparison.
> Yet America's appetite and more importantly capability of absorbing all manner of goods remains unimpaired...how?!
We are just that much richer. It's honestly mind-blowing how much more money the average American has then anyone and everyone.
This makes me wonder though, is this sustainable?
well America does, in most states, at low income brackets. free healthcare, subsidized groceries, childcare, even some higher education
which happen to be the same income brackets that most Europeans are at lol
That said in the context of this thread on why countries seem to bend over backwards for the "privilege" to sell to the USA it's because everyone is shockingly poor by comparison.
Borrowing money from the future.
Some of that consumption is stupid from a sustainability perspective. For example:
Car dependency means that:
- both the initial cost of transportation
- and the ongoing cost are higher
- while the quality of life and health outcomes are worse
than for decent active transportation.
However no one can deny that the money is there in the US.
There are many cases of "money for the sake of money" in the US (healthcare and ultra processed foods being other examples), but again, the US is good at making money. Large, educated workforce on top of a humongous chunk of prime global real estate.
Because of this, the US dollar is the reserve currency and quite strong, which combined with strong credit means that Americans are quite incentived to spend. Another point is that this dynamic concentrates jobs in high paying roles like Finance, leading to a "winner takes all" economy. Which is relevant because 50% of consumption is done by the top 10% of the population.
this would represent an additional cost on top of that that only USA consumers pays.
They can compensate for that by lowering living standards and simultaneously raising expectations in the country.
Everyone was competitive against TSMC until just 10 or 20 years ago. Then they all lost to TSMC one by one. Even IBM was competitive in price against others back in 2000s.
How much capacity are we building?
What processes? What types of semiconductor products? High end? Middle? Low?
How much capacity?
Can we substitute or replace Taiwan in the future in the event of conflict?
I can't watch the video right now, but I'm curious about its claims. Or any additional HNer context.
He's fairly transparently doing the work of what you'd perhaps call a 'pop sci journalist' or so.