[wheels]

Except that your history is wrong in this case. It's more about politics and Intel's failure, and Taiwan and TSMC's capitalization on that than it is about salaries.

A lot of manufacturing did move to Taiwan in the 70s and 80s because labor costs were lower there then, and because the US was investing a lot in Taiwan because of its strategic role vis-a-vis mainland China. But that wasn't especially high tech, and was decades before TSMC became relevant on the global market for anything but very low-end chips.

The way that TSMC ended up on top was by beating Intel at its own game. It did that at a time where Taiwan was already rich, and the US wasn't actively subsidizing the semi-conductor industry, whereas Taiwan's government was. It seems naive to assume that Intel wouldn't have had a decade of missed deadlines if it'd just thrown more money at the problem. In that this article started off about corporate culture, it's not hard to argue that much of what killed US chip fabrication dominance was Intel's corporate culture (as opposed to cheap Asian labor).

Basically there was a lot of consolidation in fabrication in the US, then with all of the eggs in a couple of baskets, the US-based fabs dropped the ball, and TSMC and Samsung smelled blood and stepped up their game.

[majormajor]

Ah, I see we're talking across each other some actually because of talking about different timeframes. I was confused by comments about Taiwan being rich when I was thinking about a story starting in the late 80s, not just the last decade.

I'm not particularly focused on Intel at the very top-end here. TSMC capitalizing on Intel dropping the ball in the 2010s doesn't happen if there wasn't a trend that continued through the 90s and 2000s that helps them get in the position to capitalize. Labor costs then were part of the equation - after all, they still haven't fully caught up.

The US being down to essentially one player that made their living focusing on just the top of the market is because of that process that hollowed out the US-based industry.

The alternative scenario I'm pitching isn't "Intel doesn't screw up cause they throw even more money at it" it's "the US semiconductor industry has multiple big players so that the are more domestic players to try to pounce on Intel's mistakes." But, because of cost pressure, including cost of labor, I believe that would take specific action and policy choices.

(This also isn't just a "US vs Asia" thing - Japanese companies have lost business to other more recent Asian entrants in the electronics and related manufacturing space as well.)