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by jgab
469 days ago
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The equipment in chip fabs is highly sensitive to weather and natural disasters. So sites like Arizona, Austin, Oregon are chosen due to low prevalence of earthquakes no hurricanes etc. The fabs anyways don’t ship chips to the devices they go into, they do to a separate site where they get tested, packaged and then are sent off. The reason to onshore this is not about scale but process capability and adding security to supply chain in case Taiwan gets in a conflict. It’s not about scale but ability to produce high yielding chips at shrinking technology size, is vastly becoming a physics problem at smaller nodes. Reality is that Samsung and Intel could run a similar fab but their yields, efficiency and process development is lagging behind TSMC. So easier to onshore TSMC process here that help Intel learn how to speedrun transition to foundry model (producing others chip designs) |
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I see, but I think you are still skipping the major point that the chips need to be installed in a device to be useful. That device assembly is largely in Asia, and the US does not have the ready capacity to suddenly start assembling devices.
> not about scale but process capability and adding security to supply chain in case Taiwan gets in a conflict
> Samsung and Intel could run a similar fab but their yields, efficiency and process development
If we don't need scale, then why couldn't Intel just produce the chips inefficiently in case of conflict? Or if this is about protecting the supply chain for consumer goods as well, then I am back to my initial question about siting chip production far from the places the chips are installed into devices.