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Comment by piltdownman | Hacker News Reader

I mean Ireland has some of the most strenuous regulations in this regard, with dozens of data centres blocked over planning and environmental impact assessments. Despite this Intel still put €30 billion in turning a 360-acre former stud farm in Kildare into a semiconductor wafer fabrication facility, powered entirely by green energy, and acting a key location for production of Intel’s 14nm process technology. They currently pull 1,677,197 MWh/year from our grid.

More to the point, from 2019 they built €17 billion new fab development which doubled the manufacturing capacity available in Ireland and enabled the production of Intel 4, the company’s most advanced process technology.

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For better or worse, Ireland’s extremely lax tax rules resulted in a ton of multinational corporate cash ‘stuck’ there with companies having the option of spending there roughly tax free or repatriating back to the US at some rate higher than that. It also really helps sell the ‘of course an Irish subsidiary owns all of our IP’ tax claims if there is actual spending there, hence you got all the pharma investment and the capital projects from others like Intel and Apple.

Rather the US lax rules regarding their own enforcement.

The Double Irish (& Dutch Sandwich) where Companies routed profits through two Irish-registered subsidiaries, attributing intellectual property royalties to a management seat in a tax haven like Bermuda, is closed since 2015.

Subsequent sequential mismatch structures (the "Single Malt" tool) that replaced the Double Irish for certain firms using non-EU residency loops were also banned. Finally there's a 12.5% charge on unrealized capital gains when a company moves its assets or tax residency out of Ireland.

The headline tax rate and the effective tax rate are also very different things. France's effective corporate tax rate was actually lower than Irelands - but France is an absolutely brutal place to do business in for employers and they've comparatively no english-language tech FDI to speak of.

France corporate taxes are not that bad, but the corporate paid social charges are massive (40-45% of employees gross salary)

I pay similar in the USA and get literally nothing in “social” or otherwise return. I’d trade with french anytime

I understand your frustration, but it's not literally nothing - just less than it should be. The US still has Medicaid/Medicare, public schools, welfare services, emergency services, etc (even if you don't use them yourself you benefit from a reduction in the number of desparate people around you if they were cut back even further than they already have).

If you are completely broke and go/are brought to a hospital in the US with an immediate life threatening medical issue, they will still try to save your life.

it is literally almost nothing :)

I am too young for M&M, public schools are the worst and I pay ridiculous amount of money for private education. welfare services? depending on where you live (I live in urban area) welfare services would make sure I am just as homeless as if I didn’t get any welfare service…

and yes, the ER will take me to save my life but that about as low of a bar as one could come up with.

Just to be clear, the employer first pays ~40-45% of the original salary, then the employee pays ~32-38% of the original salary.

i.e. a 100,000 EUR annual salary, the employer pays ~40,000 EUR to the government, then the employee gets their wage slips with additional deductions of ~38,000 EUR.

= total of ~78,000 EUR tax on a 100,000 EUR salary.

I don't think anything like that level of taxation exists in the US?

The tax loading in the US on the equivalent of a 100,000 EUR salary is much lower than this.

At 100,000 USD (a bit lower than EUR) the combined tax load on income for both employee and employer is typically ~30-35% depending on locale. In the US, $100k is pretty close to the median household income.

If you have extremely high incomes (e.g. 1,000,000+ USD) the gap closes a bit but even in the highest tax locales the marginal tax loading maxes out at ~60% of top-line income.

US Federal tax rates are some of the most progressive in the world. Only ~20% of households are net taxpayers after transfer payments and subsidies. Ironically, this is why it is so difficult to significantly increase income tax revenue in the US. It would require the middle-class majority to vote to raise their own taxes.

Which jurisdiction? I highly doubt your effective tax rate is anywhere close to that. Especially considering the myriad deductions and exemptions one should be able to take with a high income (401k, Roth IRA, HSA, 529, etc).

"Trapped capital" is not why Intel has doubled down on Ireland.

It's because whenever Intel asks for anything, the Taoiseach, IDA, and Invest Ireland will move mountains to do it.

Ireland is extremely business friendly because their leadership actually listens to industry.

While I agree completely with you regarding how we handle FDI, the role of Enterprise Ireland, and that our ability to act as an educated, stable and culturally compatible western european base for US industry is not to be understated, the Intel situation in particular has its own special nuance.

This is where the 'Inside Tennis' knowledge of the Irish Tech industry from someone working within it comes in handy. Enter the 21st Century Luddite, Thomas Reid, from stage left.

Thomas is an eccentric, independent bachelor farmer whose family has owned a 72-acre farm next to Intel's Leixlip manufacturing campus for generations.

Ireland’s State Industrial Development Agency (IDA) attempted to use a Compulsory Purchase Order (CPO) to buy Reid's land so that Intel could proceed with a multi-billion euro expansion of its microchip production plant. The land was valued at €5 million. During the negotiations that followed, the farmer was reportedly offered in the region of €10 million. He turned it down. Reid had no interest in being a millionaire. Instead, he continued to live on-site without a telephone or modern amenities while taking on Intel and the state alone.

The battle culminated in a landmark legal fight that went all the way to the Supreme Court of Ireland, where Reid ultimately won a historic victory against corporate overreach and protected his property rights

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lonely_Battle_of_Thomas_Re...

https://www.reddit.com/r/ireland/comments/3s4bg1/how_a_farme...

https://www.irishtimes.com/business/commercial-property/inte...

https://www.rte.ie/culture/2020/1102/1003311-the-lonely-batt...

Overreach? Annoying one guy and making him rich in exchange for such a huge buildout isn't overreach in my book. When I think of the overreach of eminent domain the examples have a lot more people and a lot less free millions of dollars.

> Enter the 21st Century Luddite, Thomas Reid, from stage left.

How does any of this make him a Luddite?

Luddites weren’t anti-technology. They were highly skilled workers that actually wanted to be involved with it.

They wanted technology to serve them not make their conditions worse as they worked with it.

This guy just doesn’t to sell his farm. That’s not the same at all.

They certainly tried!

>construction kicked off in 2019 on a €17 billion new fab development which will double

I think what the OP wanted to highlight is right here: in China or Taiwan etc. this would not have taken 7 years.

I mixed up a tense or two there. It was done in 4 years, even accounting for Covid. The timeline looks like this

2019: Kick-off

2020: Construction in Ireland basically halted due to Lockdown for 18 months

Q3'2023: Fab 34 begins running a ‘First Full Loop’ of silicon

Q4'2023: Fab 34 completed. Doubles the manufacturing capacity available in Ireland, enabling the production of Intel 4 and Intel 3, some of the company’s most advanced process technologies, and the first to incorporate EUV lithography

2024: Intel sold 49% stake to Apollo GM for $11.2bn

2026: Intel buys back stake for $14.2bn

Q2'2026: Intel announce a further $5.7bn investment to upgrade existing capacity for server chips, slated for completion by late 2027

That's just low taxes pushing against everything else in the Irish regulation.

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