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by mschuster91
236 days ago
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The problem they are alluding to is environmental regulations - it's outright impossible or very very expensive to do certain manufacturing processes, especially silicon and medicine, due to the substances involved. And that is valid for both the US and EU actually, there's a reason Silicon Valley is the densest concentration of Superfund sites in the US, and there is a reason why most of SV production has left for China and Taiwan. An additional problem is, both the US and EU have been pretty happy to just ship off the environmental damage to Asia to the tune of "out of sight out of mind". We got cheaper products (especially in medicine, our healthcare systems would outright collapse if it weren't for Chinese and Indian generics and precursors), but the total amount of environmental damage in the world hasn't shrunk, it has grown. |
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I think you're, er, exaggerating this a little; Intel and GlobalFoundries both have large fabs in Europe. Given that Intel is going to be fabbing some nVidia chips, some of those will quite likely be made in their "Intel 4" (ie 7nm) fab in Ireland. And GlobalFoundries has a big (albeit older-tech) fab in Germany. Bosch also has a big 40nm fab in Germany for car stuff; old process, but high volume.
It's only fairly recently that the most advanced fabs have been outside the US or Europe; until late last decade the most advanced process was usually either made at Intel's Irish plant, or one of their US ones. And GlobalFoundries was also competitive at one time.
As for medicine, the world's largest drug exporting countries are Germany, Switzerland, the US, and Ireland, more or less in that order, though it shifts around a bit. Besides the US, _all_ of the top ten exporters are in the EU or EFTA. Germany is also one of the largest, if not the largest, exporters of medical _equipment_.