The world collectively (mostly the US) spends trillions on national defense, that spending is unnecessary if we all just got along. I think you're right that everyone spending money on local semiconductor industries is even more wasteful.
Unfortunately, that defense allows hoarding wealth. If the wealth was more evenly distributed globally, there would be little reason to defend against raids.
This is how places like the US despite having 4% of the population have about a quarter of the material and energy consumption. Not to single them out, I am in Australia, it is a similar ratio.
I am not defending this situation, just highlighting its role.
Not all wars are about raiding, especially in the modern era. Putin isn’t interested in Ukraine’s wealth. Nor would a Chinese invasion of Taiwan be about money.
"No wars have been more ruthless and ravaging than “just” wars, fought in “defense” of religion, honor, or principle. If war must be, give me rather a war to capture an enemy’s wealth and territory, based on honest greed, in which I shall be careful not to destroy what I want to possess. " - Alan Watts
I think it depends on what the goal is. Like, lots of countries (and probably a few US state) could, I bet, do their own foundries for, like, 22nm. Process node names are bullshit of course, but we’re talking about stuff that Intel was doing in 2012, Global Foundries in 2015.
22nm is already overkill for a lot of applications. But, like, if your country gets embargoed, you should be able to make computer chips for cars and farming equipment. Top end GPUs? Not necessary. Some basic RISC-V cpu for compute appliances? That should be a capability that everybody has.
That doesn't sound unreasonable. That is Ivy Bridge/Intel Core 3rd gen capabilities. You aren't running a generative AI but can do all manner of work loads. Combined with some software efficiency gains and you could be fairly comfortable.
This part of why I have been advocating for years that the open source/free software folks should be focusing on optimization and stability/security as long term it will probably be much more useful that adding features that can be dumped on top.
Sounds like a huge infusion of cash to highly skilled workers, and supporting the building of skills that can be transferred between companies sounds like a good thing.
Whats wrong with redundancy? Not having redundant supply of anything is a problem as human history has repeatedly shown. I think this kind of modern "more profit = more better" is just a ticking time bomb for a massive disaster, and it isn't like we haven't had any warning signs about critical supply problems for any number of resources and goods.
If you can print the money required with no bad consequences, go right ahead and build all the redundancies.
The problem with bleeding-edge fab is it's a (fast) moving target. It's not a solved problem. And customers can't simply migrate their designs to a different fab, as the designs are increasingly specific to a process.
I do think we need more fabs but not this kind. Very low cost fabs with standardized PDK and open(ish) tools, should be as simple as ordering a PCB. Not going to happen anytime soon though, needs old fabs to stop production and the bleeding-edge to hit a hard wall. Can't compete with fully depreciated legacy fabs/nodes.
This is too glib: If you imagine a world where every critical industry is replicated in every large nation, often inefficiently or inadequately, that’s a world where the average person is much, much poorer.
It’s a tradeoff between resilience and efficiency.
You can go for full efficiency if you want, but then like the US auto manufacturers learned during Covid, you don’t have any way to handle disruptions to your business
The premise of this thread is that efficient markets and comparative advantage won’t leave even a large nation with enough of the right competitive local industries for national security or whatever objective.
Thus to sustain those industries (semiconductor fabrication in this case) industrial policy (subsidies, tariffs, government investment, “Buy American” rules, … ) is essential.
I agree that industrial policy is essential for a nation that wants to ensure that competitive industries exist within the nation's economy.
But the justification I replied to was that the nation must inherently suffer material inefficiencies for a nation to do this, due to how economies work, which is not the case (or at least, no real justification was offered other than the heuristic that larger firms are somehow inherently more efficient, which if anything is opposite to my experience in a very large org).
A nation might well implement an industrial policy so as to pessimize its local industries that survive, but that is not required to happen either.
I don’t think the problem with the Soviets was doing everything themselves, which seems to be working okay for China. The problem is that centralized planning doesn’t work, and the system dehumanized people and destroyed incentives for people to innovate.