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Comment by samcheng | Hacker News Reader

Intel spends about $10 billion per year on R&D, and a single fab costs about $10 billion (they build one every few years).

If they want to catch Intel, they will want to at least spend as much as them, and also benefit from IP-leakage. So I guess it depends on how far you think they are behind the state of the art?

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They already have fabs, many fabless companies, and plenty of cheap engineers. This is likely money that will go into R&D improving existing tech, I.P. to steal more market, and possibly EDA if they're smart. They don't need to drop $10 billion if they build on what's already out there and do it smart. My plans for a platform SOC were expected to cost somewhere between $10-50 million for 45nm and 28nm by carefully leveraging MPW's and cheap engineers. I could kill whole markets with $1-10bil. My imagination looses detail at the $100bil point.

But once you start making semi-conductors you start making money. The 100 billion is the seed capital. Semi-conductors pay for themselves once they're rolling. See samsung's balance sheet.

If only. Intel is the only remaining company with own fabs, all others have long exited that particular line of business.

Designing chips makes money, manufacturing them in $10B and rising fabs that stop making profit after a few years not so much.

This is not a play against Intel, it is a play against TSMC which is the backbone of the Taiwanese economy. They very much haven't exited the foundry business and are very profitable ($7bn a year or so in net income), and are stealing away even the iDevice SoC business from Samsung these days...

Yup, my first thought when I saw the headline was "this is a non-military attack on Taiwan due to the KMT (pro-Beijing party) getting annihilated in the polls two weeks ago".

Let's not forget Samsung which is not that far behind and even more integrated than Intel.

Can't we even achieve more in China with the same amount of money as in the US, thanks to lower cost of living? Also, creating a $10bn fab is not as hard as Intel inventing it for the first time.

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