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Comment by ahmeneeroe-v2 | Hacker News Reader

This is a complicated problem so the US won't be able to figure it out? We do complicated manufacturing here that many countries cannot do.

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Not without investing in figuring it out:

> "If you don't have R&D in the US, you will not have semiconductor leadership in the US," Gelsinger said, according to a report this week in the Financial Times.

It is a worthwhile first step. Yes we won't regain leadership without making follow on steps, but that is hardly newsworthy.

Fair enough. More of a reminder to pay attention to how TSMC approaches R&D in the states, since a part of the $165B investment is for a proposed R&D facility. If they focus on optimizing existing processes (as has been suggested) and keep the development of new processes in Taiwan, then that's a signal that we're not on a path to success (at least in Pat's eyes).

Agree on the newsworthy.. quotes like this are not super valuable... however the concept is that without real R&D the actual manufacturing is not as valuable. Of course it is better than no manufacturing, but in EUV, the real magic is in the process development.

A suboptimal amount of would be engineers works for spyware companies I guess. And the mind share is with top of the pyramid financial engineering fluff not actually doing stuff.

When I worked with machine engineering there was this gloomy prospect of all these "lifers" who would reach retirement age some day and be replaced by an consultants burning out every 6 months.

The US could figure something out decades ago doesn't mean it can now. I think ship building (even military ship building) is another example that the US could do decades ago with a very large capacity but I'm not sure whether it can reboot to such capacity nowadays.

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