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Comment by dharma1 | Hacker News Reader

TSMC is building a fab in Arizona, but it won't be production ready until mid 2020s.

https://www.tomshardware.com/uk/news/tsmc-arizona-fab-invest...

Intel has fabs in the US (and Israel), but they have some catching up to do with TSMC - a lot of things have gone wrong for Intel the last few years. I hope they'll get their shit together and bounce back.

China has its own fabs (SMIC) and has been investing heavily into this, but as they are now banned from buying the EUV machines it will take a while, possibly up to a decade until they get to smaller process nodes. Long term China will be able to fab cutting edge chips itself, and possibly surpass others - looking at their tech trajectory and state funding. The US tech sanctions against China are just buying time.

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> possibly up to a decade

Their optoelectronics/optics tech is getting to the state of the art in a short period by their pace of progress from the rumors that I heard.

I'd wager 3-4 years before they have EUV themselves while avoiding conflict supply chain. Not 10 years time as you say.

They got some of the best minds on the planet working, so I wouldn't think that they cannot achieve it rather quick.

Zeiss and ASML are going to have real competition soon.

could absolutely happen sooner. It is of high strategic importance to China - to their whole electronics industry, and the AI dominance race, which also depends on specialised chips.

State level AI dominance race is one of the main drivers of the US/China tech sanctions, I suspect

> Zeiss and ASML are going to have real competition soon.

FYI: Zeiss itself been buying low-end stepper lens work from Chinese for at least a decade, or two.

> TSMC is building a fab in Arizona, but it won't be production ready until mid 2020s.

By which time they will be shipping 3nm from Taiwan. https://www.anandtech.com/show/16024/tsmc-details-3nm-proces...

That Arizona fab line is only for military tech right, no way that its enough to feed the western world with state of the art semi conductor designs.

> TSMC is building a fab in Arizona, but it won't be production ready until mid 2020s.

And given the previously promised obscenely sized financial incentive may not come now, this is not a given now as well.

Intel do not license out production capacity and so they are not a solution for a diverse market of semi conductor companies.

> they are now banned from buying the EUV machines

What is stopping them from making their own?

Nothing, but it takes a while to catch up. There is a reason ASML is the only player in the world for EUV

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