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Comment by raylad | Hacker News Reader

We need to be doing much, much more of this so that the country has ownership of substantial percentages of the critical infrastructure, including AI. That seems to be one of the only ways that the citizens in general will be able to share in the fruits of the technology, similarly to how Alaskan citizens get payments from petroleum.

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Part of the reason we don't want this is because it creates an enormous government spoil, which is the decision to label a given company as part of the critical infrastructure of the country. For example: why Intel and not AMD? Does Micron make the cut? Seagate? What about the companies that make the inputs to the fabs? Telecom companies that run the Internet? Microsoft & Apple because business runs on their software?

This is Too Big To Fail on steroids.

> citizens in general will be able to share in the fruits of the technology, similarly to how Alaskan citizens get payments from petroleum

The alternative approach is right there in your answer. Like in Alaska or Norway, tax the winners and apply the benefits to citizens.

Sadly, we are going the other way both on taxation and benefits. The good news is we can at any time choose to live differently. Some might debate whether we could maintain our competitive business environment if Intel or Nvidia paid a tax rate comparable to yours, but perhaps it's worth a try?

I agree with your point, but to answer your first question, “why Intel and not AMD?” It is simply because Intel is the only US company, and one of only three chip manufacturers worldwide to even try to make cutting edge chips and that has an outside shot of doing so in the next decade or so.

Domestic chip production is a national security interest. Frankly the US should be funding one or more companies to expand their fab capabilities.

AMD is a US company:

Founder: Jerry Sanders

Headquarters: Santa Clara, California

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD

AMD doesn't fab their own chips. They currently utilize TSMC for that. Yes, if we were only talking about cutting edge chip design the US has no shortage.

USG is looking at spending ~$10B on an Intel stake. It's worth wondering whether it might make more sense to instead put the same money into AMD and earmark it for US fabs. Ditto NVidia.

There is an argument to be made there about how best to allocate the funds, but regardless of how the funds are deployed that spend has to be on Intel if you want it to protect US chip manufacturing and R&D. There are no other US chip manufacturers that are even trying to produce a chip under 12 nm. Unfortunately they are the only viable option.

Why can't we just raise taxes on corporations?

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