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Comment by mlsu | Hacker News Reader

Jury is still out on whether they can do that though. Chip fab requires a skilled and specialized manufacturing workforce, which does not exist here in the US. They can build the fabs, but they will need to import the talent to run them.

I'm not seeing the domestic pipeline. What is the pathway for a high school graduate today to work on the line at one of these chip fabs that are coming up? Would any bright young person choose to do that today?

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> I'm not seeing the domestic pipeline.

I hear a different by similar version of this same idea, which is that a lot of fab engineers and semiconductor engineers have retired. I wonder if the US lacks the ecosystem to churn out these engineers. I don't mean just the schools but also the non-leading edge foundries that aren't as sophisticated to help new college grads gain experience before they get employed at leading edge foundries.

It kind of sucks, but software is just such a damn good deal that you kind of have to be dumb to go engineering and stay out of software.

WFH and make $180k/yr with elite benefits or commute to a lab full of dangerous/hazardous stuff and make $100k with crap benefits?

They did a bit on the local news (Phoenix) about some community college setup which was supposed to be sort of a feeder system.

The wildcard is how effectively they can leverage the national-security angle. I can imagine them tapping government funds to pay ridiculous money to create a supply chain of vetted fourth-generation pure blood citizens to make rad-hardened Pentiums for the Navy or something.

Was there such a pipeline in any country where a fab was built? Or did clever people just apply to the company and get trained on the job? This is not a new problem for the US or any other country. IMO people don't study manufacturing-adjacent stuff as much in the US because there is little manufacturing going on here.

My school had a 1(?) micron fab for EE student projects (among other things), at a time when that wasn't decades behind the bleeding edge. It may have been a few years behind.

We can do it, people have counted out the US innovation and capabilities in the past, people can learn the business, we can import more knowledge for the right prices. I doubt there will that many high schoolers in there, just a whole lot of automation and robotics.

The US has lots of fabs already, this isn’t some unknown.

It's a big "if"

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