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Comment by mmmBacon | Hacker News Reader

I don’t know any chip manufacturers that shutdown due to COVID. Everyone has been shipping the entire time and fabs are at capacity. The way chip manufacturing works is that you get a slot and if you cancel they fill your slot with something else. There have been fab issues but these have been unrelated to COVID and would have happened anyway.

To me this seems like auto industry trying to shift blame away from their supply chain management to their vendors.

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Texas Instruments has a facility that has had output reduced due to COVID staffing issues for at least the past 6 months. They produce parts that I use in my 1000 pc/year medical device that Toyota and GM vacuum up at a much higher rate. Hard to compete against those heavyweights for available stock. I'm sure there are other manufacturers encountering the same. This isn't just the fancy very-small nm processes, it's effecting the whole industry.

There have also been unfortunate disasters such as a fire at Renesas https://www.yahoo.com/news/renesas-says-plans-restore-full-0... that have affected lead times.

Has there been any detailed reporting on the root cause of the fire? It's strange that an electrical fire can start in the first place in what should be an extremely well-engineered factory, let alone spread to over 6000 square feet, and if that's possible there, it'd be great to learn more to avoid it elsewhere.

What I couldnt find out so far is what the chip manufacturers are producing instead of automotive chips then? There must be another industry which has a significantly increased need or will get a lot of chips earlier than planned. Wondering which industry that will be.

Cant be the GPU market either ;-)

Maybe it's some state actor piling up bitcoin miners :p

Car manufacturers released all of their slots at the beginning of 2020 so those were sold to the entertainment industry instead. Turns out there is a price on not dying and it's "a car instead of public transportation".

It actually is GPUs and CPUs.

AMD growth is gone through the roof in general computing, and they're the sole supplier for both PS5 and Xbox's CPU and GPU chips. Unlike Intel who have their own fabs, AMD is locked into TSMC - and when auto manufacturers relinquished slots, they went in.

Nvidia ships a boatload of chips for Nintendo Switch plus GPUs for almost all altcoin miners that can be mined with GPUs and everyday regular gamers.

Basically everything we use? Many many things have electronics inside that is chips and as demand have moved from services to things there is more things bought, thus more demand. Then add to this some distortions... These are chips in question, not that there is not also demand on high-end. But that is also makers learning that it's better for them to constrain supply. RAM for example was at one point very cheap.

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