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Comment by coredog64 | Hacker News Reader

There are like half a dozen semiconductor manufacturers in Phoenix that were here before TSMC arrived. There's a robust pipeline from ASU to these same manufacturers. Can we please just stop with the nonsensical notion that "Americans don't know how to fabricate semiconductors"?

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American economics doesn't allow fabrication of semiconductors even if there is the know how.

Think about how Intel, who pioneered the know how, can't build cutting edge nodes in the levels that they need to make it profitable.

IBM had to sell their fabs to cater to the whims of "shareholders".

It's the greed of stockholders that you need to blame.

TSMC is a publicly traded company just like the others. I'm not familiar with their governance but Google tells me the largest owner (a state development fund) has 6%.

They have a special advantage because they don't compete with their customers, which leads to trust, which leads to customers paying for their R&D for them.

Intel on the other hand just kind of sucks at their job. Skill issue basically. (But they aren't /that/ far behind.)

its not that the USA can't produce semi-conductors. Its that semi-conductor production, at TSMC's scale (both in terms of number of units, yield rates, and depth) currently requires highly skilled workers to work a lot of their hours to "baby sit" the wafer production.

Maybe there is a world where TSMC can hire enough skilled workers and optimize processes enabling people to go home at 5p, but that is not currently the case.

Yes. This. So, yeah, essentially fundamentally incompatible with the US economy.

The US is going to have to heavily subsidize the payroll of tens of thousands of very accomplished EEs/etc to make this work. By doing that they will also wreck the HW part of SV.

There isn't really a HW part of SV. Hardware engineers aren't paid well enough to live there in droves like programmers. There are some of course, but the ones I know are in San Diego or Bremerton or Israel.

Also, it's completely normal to run a factory 24/7. I think people are just impressed because TSMC is the only one they've read about?

(However, it's correct that a TSMC fab is the most advanced and complicated process on the planet.)

Nvidia, AMD, Intel and Applied Materials probably employ like 100k people in SV?

SV already wrecked HW engineering by paying far more for SW than market rate HW such that anyone with financial ambition made the switch long ago.

We won't be seeing a TSMC plant in France anytime soon then.

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