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Comment by tylerfontaine | Hacker News Reader

I live in a relatively small city that has a 30B phased wafer fab project under way, and an another separate 5B wafer fab project underway, and plans for at least one more in the next couple years.

Anecdotal, of course, but there's some real things being built for sure.

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Is that a city that TSMC is already throwing under the bus and saying the American workers there are lazy and not cut out for their harder Taiwanese business/work ethic? https://9to5mac.com/2023/06/29/tsmc-arizona-chip-plant-delay...

I don't think any of this onshoring, if it ever actually happens, is going to be a net positive for the areas that host the fabs. TSMC is already sending hundreds of their own workers over to America to work on stuff because they aren't happy with the local workforce, I don't see any reason why this will change any time soon. The US is just going to be a place they send their workers to fab chips in plants that got sweet cost/tax breaks, and that they don't care at all about polluting the local environment.

Nope, I'm in Texas and not Arizona. We've already got two wafer plants here. The largest projects are expansions on those, so these companies are pretty familiar with the available workforce at this point.

Is this perhaps just sour grapes from TSMC because they actually need to train the new workforce?

The hilarious thing is that when TSMC was founded they had to train EVERYONE. Taiwan had zero chip fabrication talent. All of the specialists at the time, even the founder of TSMC, were in the US. For them to complain that it's impossible to train a workforce is laughable and is most likely just racism/nationalism.

To be fair the expertise needed to produce chips in 1987 and 2023 is radically different.

The continuity of knowledge transitioning from one generation of production to the next shouldn’t be underrated. If you started in 1987 with state-of-the-art knowledge and kept up with the advances, your knowledge would have transformed over the years.

Of course, if you’re just getting started now, the knowledge from 1987 is of little use (not entirely useless though) and indeed drastically different from 2023 SotA.

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