Intel took billions from the CHIPS Act, and gave nothing back | Hacker News Reader

Intel took billions from the CHIPS Act, and gave nothing back

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27 pointsgsibble23 comments

The Chips Act isn’t about creating jobs, we are trying to reduce our dependency on chips made in Taiwan, which produces 90% of all advanced chips.

Intel is the only American company that is currently capable of addressing this problem.

Other countries subsidize chip development. I don’t think the US is anywhere near the lead in chip subsidies

TSMC is building in the US and even Intel is using them since they are so far ahead engineering wise.

Yes, it’ll take a few years for Intel’s fabs to match TSMC. $20 billion and 2-3 years per fab.

It will take way more time than that because Intel is a bloated, corrupt, and incompetent company.

Indeed. In a sense, it's about reducing the probability of one path to WWIII.

This enables America to go to war against countries that produce chips without worrying too much about losing access to chips. Independence allows countries to go to war. Dependence on each other forces countries to remain neutral.

Yes but in this scenario Taiwan is an ally, China is a hostile power bent on taking over Taiwan by any means, and Taiwan is currently essential.

If China attacked Taiwan today, the West would step in out of an unshakeable reliance upon those chips. The West would implode economically without them. The supply shortages we saw during Covid are a joke compared to Taiwan vanishing.

And as with any dictatorial situation, China is driven from the top, and dictators are often over bold, or have opinions contrary to reality.. unchallenged by their underlings. They are told what they want to hear.

My point being, China is going to take Taiwan in a few years, one way or another. If the West is not self reliant at that time, there will be war.

And that was the whole point of this act. It has broad support and was voted for by a both sides of the US spectrum. Covid supply shortages provided an easy example of why supply needs to be domestic.

The age of low cost international trade is closing. Transportation is costly, the US is no longer patrolling the oceans as much, China is very actively, openly hostile now, and the world is changing. Domestic production is going to be more and more of a requirement, for everything.

It's difficult for me to picture the US and China entering into a full-scale war, primarily because of the deep financial interdependencies between them. China holds a substantial amount of US debt and, in practice, tends to view this more as a long-term investment rather than expecting immediate repayment. A military conflict would not only jeopardize this financial relationship but also risk significant economic fallout. Essentially, China has the leverage to dramatically impact the US defense budget, making a major conflict between the two countries a less likely scenario given these economic realities.

Allowing Russia to join NATO would nullify WW3. Disbanding NATO and separately signing FTA or allowing EU to do so would also prevent WW3. Heavily dependent on China and not use billions to fund disinformation will also prevent that. CIA taking out Netan will also prevent that instead of pouring more bombs to replenish Netan's troops. All in all, it sure looks like USA wholely wants WW3.

None of those things will prevent WWIII, and some of them will escalate towards WWIII.

"Allowing" Russia to join NATO is a particularly bizarre concept, not dissimilar to "allowing" a fox to join a henhouse.

I'm not making any judgements on that CHIPS money yet, because it is a long term investment.

It is a bit funny though, that they mentioned how CHIPS would create 10k jobs, and they just dropped 15k. Kind of convenient number shuffling there. Still a net loss of 5k, in the end. :)

The new US Intel fab isn't scheduled to be completed until 2025, so it's a bit early to start labeling it a failure. Are fab workers even part of the Intel layoffs?

And why bring up Nvidia? They outsource all their chip production.

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/newsroom/news/us-chi....

Naturally, anything going against the prevailing narrative of SF gets flagged. Not like Intel is laying off 15,000 - 20,000 workers who are SOL now even though they took tens of billions in taxpayer money.

I respect and like Intel, but even with my biases I am nonetheless mildly annoyed as a tax payer that we paid so much into CHIPS to still end up losing the silicon wars to Taiwan/China.

I want my tax dollars back.

We gave them the money this year. They are building fabs. This stuff takes years.

One fab can cost $20 billion.

This past year, they were expected to piss the money we gave them away on a factory in high-risk genocideland but not in the USA.

How could they have prevented those expenses?

They've finally introduced lower power gaming chips.

Hopefully they build fabs here, and we alleviate the supply chain blockade and competitive obstruction by fabricating chips out of graphene and other forms of carbon.

> we paid so much into CHIPS to still end up losing the silicon wars to Taiwan/China.

Did you earnestly expect any other outcome? TSMC has the customers, the trained personnel, the connections with ASML and the supply chain worked out. Unless the US airlifted TSMC to American soil, there's no reality where we open a factory and a year later it becomes the best in the world. It's pretty obvious that this investment is a hedged bet in geopolitical tensions going sideways, and being able to recover when it does.

>Did you earnestly expect any other outcome?

Nope. We already lost the war years ago before it even began, no amount of throwing money at this war was going to snatch victory from the bowels of defeat. CHIPS was a stupid waste of money at the outset and it is still a stupid waste of money after the fact because it arrived too late.

But that doesn't change my sentiment as a tax payer that I want my tax dollars back. Even moreso because Intel is now gutting their R&D when their problem is they are behind in R&D.

Well, I wish you and your fellow taxpayers luck finding a better-suited American chip foundry to invest in.

If the only American one is horrible, we should still subsidize it? Quite the dilemma. I'd be more on board with paying the Taiwanese to move here.

Taiwan isn't going to pack themselves up until it's already too late. Politically and economically they wouldn't agree to leave unless their sovereignty was threatened by China, at which point their fabs and equipment are probably in the process of being destroyed. There is no reality in which you just pay Taiwanese people to move to America any more than you'd pay Americans to move to Taiwan.

The only playbook is to defend Taiwan like they're the last hope for the American economy. Obviously investing in Intel won't go anywhere even in the best-case scenario, so the only logical option is to defend Taiwan and the status-quo.

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