This doesn't seem like the giant step I thought it was:
> Unlike the costly bleeding edge 2 and 3 nanometer chips made by giants like TSMC, TI’s chips are made on cheaper, legacy nodes: 45 to 130 nanometers.
What's worse:
> Making chips takes an immense amount of water, and about a quarter of Texas is in drought. Luckily, Sherman has water rights to nearby Lake Texoma.
Indeed lucky for TI, but probably not so for area residents.
Texas is a big state. It’s lazy journalism to generalize the state as droughty, which is implied by that sentence.
Lake Texoma has been hovering by the “full” mark pretty consistently for over 55 years. Recently, its water level has significantly declined to—wait for it—100% full!
If you monitor water maps, the east half of Texas’s water supplies don’t often get far outside of “full”.
Also the water doesn’t disappear from the universe. It either evaporates or is pumped back out. People who lose their minds over water have been saying for 50 years we were about to enter a desert world
There's lots of more boring chips in phones and mundane devices that are fine on older processes; things like audio stuff and battery controllers.
If you want to get away from relying on China, then those chips are the ones that are in everything from your USB hubs, keyboards, phones, washing machines - everything
Less sexy, but in many ways more critical to keeping stuff going.
The trailing edge is also where Moore's law in its original sense is still going strong. The fabrication processes get cheaper and more refined over time, while this is becoming a lot harder with new leading-edge nodes.
This is misleading, modern chip fabs recycle their water basically 100%. It's not being evaporated for cooling like in some data center deployments, it's just part of the process.
That is of course the ideal, however local economic conditions (low/subsidized water prices, etc.) may dictate a different path by incentivizing another way of doing things (open cooling systems, etc.).
They already have fabs nearby, and so, fab suppliers/services in the area.
They have a large employee pool in the vicinity, with modest salary expectations.
The southern US mostly doesn't have blizzards and ice that regularly knocks out electric supply lines, and/or makes it impossible for employees to get to/from work for days/weeks at a time.
Water is about the cheapest resource around. Even in water-stressed areas (while it may cost several times what it would in wetter parts of the US) it's still an insignificant expense for any industry that doesn't need an absolutely obscene continual supply.
Roof-top PV solar power works out a lot better in the southern US than further north.
The transfer of wealth from tax payers to tech giants has never been better.
Enormous state subsidies.
For doing something the free market would do if it made economic sense.
How many bailouts is Intel on now?
The idea of forcing a merger between Intel and TMSC at what could be called
be barrel of the gun, would at least make it (indirectly) Taiwan that would
have to take over paying for Intel.
You can’t build a modern fab (which this one doesn’t seem to be? But even old fabs are extremely expansive) without subsidies. They’re extremely expensive to build, and depreciate so quickly, no private party is willing to put the funds.
You have likely not experienced it as governments and monetary systems have absorbed these risks (ie. they have moved them elsewhere, hidden away, until some major explosion happens).
Chips are like agriculture: It does not matter that the home grown product can only compete with government support, you never want to be in a position where you cannot provide for your country’s minimal needs purely from local sources.
It depends what the minimal needs are, but basically the US has this for chips already. Yes the US only makes older chips, but in fact those are the ones that really matter, that you can’t do without. The ones that are in everything.
However making everything domestically just isn’t really viable for any country any more. The scale of our technological civilization and the diversity of goods and materials it depends on is more that any one continent can support, let alone one country.
It would be possible to collapse that down to one continent if absolutely necessary, but it would be incredibly economically painful and the US would need to give up on a lot of non-essentials and other priorities to devote resources to duplicating capacity that already exists elsewhere.
Buying rocks and exporting chips is fine. Of course it's not that extreme but the sentiment is there. It's about expertise capital and concentrating that domestically.
I think it is not about one country doing to all. But technology transfer should happen within like minded countries and within a smaller circle. So may be two continents max.
Are there going to be Congressional hearings at least where Citizens can see a debate with witnesses testifying under oath? Will the Congressional research office publish statistics and data we can read together to debate?
Or will some backroom deal be made without any Congressional approval? I got a lot of questions and basically there is no way to get answers since Republicans gave the president:
1. unilateral authority to set tax rates (tariffs and illegal export levies)
1. impound Congressionally appropriated funds on an ad-hoc basis
1. unilaterally close down federal agencies created by Congress
I refuse to debate the merits of this industrial policy while the above three things are true. There is nothing to debate here because no one outside the administration's inner circle (industrialists bribing) who knows what is going on.
I feel like my 7th grade Civics class has been a complete waste. Or, it lets me see what is happening in the correct light.
This is a completely meaningless statement. It sounds good, but contains no actual argument. why are chips like agriculture? What makes that statement not apply to literally every product category that exists?
Agriculture is self-evident, we need food on a daily basis to live. I don’t need three square microprocessors a day.
Just like you don’t want to wait many months to tool up to make food if there is conflict…
You don’t want to wait many years to tool up to make chips that go in weapons, either.
Else, you risk being structurally defeated very early, and this leads to others concluding that they can take you on. It undermines other preparations.
Farming equipment needs microchips, as does practically any modern device, vehicle, machine, etc. If you don't have domestic microchip production then pretty much everything else you make will have foreign dependencies that could be embargoed.
>It does not matter that the home grown product can only compete with government support,
Even that isn't a given, because unless you have amassed a certain amount of technocratic and governmental competency chances are it can't compete even with government support and you just produce crony dysfunctional companies.
And of course there's economic trade offs. If you're politically ordering your economy to make chips, it doesn't make something else, and whatever it was making and trading for chips it was better at, and so you get fewer chips, that's comparative advantage. Industrial policy (and tariffs) do not increase aggregate production, they reduce it. And given that the circle of items you "can't do without" seems to be a bit of a moving target these days, at some point you're actually more brittle because you've replaced large chunks of the market with state production.
People take it as an assumption that cronyism will always happen if the government invests too strongly/consistently in a certain thing. But cronyism is a policy and structural failure, it's usually because the incentives for the different parties involved encourage it to happen. Institutions can be designed carefully if policymakers actually want to do it.
USPS is a great example of an organization that's managed to largely avoid this. Whenever you mention that people crawl out of the woodwork to complain about the 7 different times they lost their package, but their logistics at scale is still unmatched by the private sector, while also not completely negating the value of private sector alternatives (which so often is argued would happen if the government actively started doing anything new).
How? What if we just decide we will never go to war with Mexico or Canada and get comfortable with the idea of importing from our allies? There is no serious future risk from doing that
It's an extension of a peace through strength philosophy. If you lose your critical sovereign capabilities you become weak and vulnerable. You no longer get to decide who you do and don't "never go to war with".
This kind of answers your own question: the reality is you are only a reliable US ally [1] if you can hold them by the balls TSMC style. Given that countries go to great lengths to develop and maintain such dependencies. Canada's current weakness is at least in part because it has failed to do so.
[1] Edit to add: This was/is poorly worded - I mean that the US will only guarantee that you remain an ally while they are in some sense dependent on you, and while doing so they may work to break that dependence, which you may interpret as them trying to abandon you.
Russia has been totally isolated from global market and they are still producing hundreds of cruise missiles a month just fine. America could easily figure it out long enough to survive a few yrs of conflict. Even stockpiling 10yr old chips would be good enough 95% of military industry. Then emergency investment and smuggling will cover the rest.
Meanwhile cutting off your markets and wasting hundreds of billions on a long term bet with a small probability that another global war will happen is pretty dumb financial thinking.
Tariffs and corporate welfare will actively make a country poorer and create unproductive zombie markets while raising taxes on everyone. Not to mention diverting budgets and new revenue away from actual national security investment.
Up until relatively recently we were the SOTA and #1 semiconductor exporter. When people talked about the "american manufacturing sector" a significant portion of it was actually that.
Those foundries didn't go away, they're still manufacturing with the same capabilities they used to (and they're much cheaper now since they're competing with the better ones in Taiwan.)
It's good to hear TI hasn't given up on high performance SOCs as it was beginning to look like they had. But most of this stuff is still here. Freescale and many other American companies are still making the same (better even) chips they always have which is more than enough for cruise missiles (more than enough for decent PDAs and smartphones really) even without "stockpiling."
I don't know if it was on purpose or not, but I have heard it said more than once that Republican led states are able to greenlight projects faster, are more business-friendly environments, and generally have less red tape compared to Democrat led states. Love it or hate it, but greenlighting projects is a big component in allocating funds.
On the other hand, if they were so much better, shouldn't those "red states" be the ones with the much better economies?
I'm looking at China and what environmental price in the form of polluted land they pay and will be paying for a very long time. The big problems in Western countries also all originated in times with less or no regulation of such things. Just because that's not in the headlines all the time does not mean the problem is any less while the public is not paying attention.
When "it works" and overall success is the only criteria, the Vikings and Mongols surely count as extremely successful. Regulation is meant to take the price into account, in the cases of those two peoples millions of dead and a lot of pillaging and conquering. Regulation is definitely a burden, if you don't have to care about anything but the bottom line it's much easier.
Definitely not true. Right now Red states are openly attacking businesses that don't agree with the prevailing ideology. In Florida, the governor tried to destroy the state's biggest employer. In Texas they have been trying to prosecute out of state businesses. Alabama has more taxes on businesses than California.
I thought it is because they have worst economies and it is always an attempt to prop them up.
The other reason is that while republican party is purposefully trying to destroy economies of blue states, democrats were not trying to purposefully destroy economy of red states.
This might be true, it’s definitely repeated, but it’s generally not the real reason.
The real answer is just politics. Blue states have (generally) healthy economies, with a variety of economic actors and many businesses. Businesses often will shop around various states to build a factory looking for tax cuts. The politician can be associated with new jobs, and the business gets a discount, so it appears to be a win-win (if you ignore the lack of tax revenue). No one needs a tax break to start a business in NYC, LA, nor Silicon Valley, so you don’t hear about all the businesses that open there.
Nationally, policies like the IRA are big boosters for the economy, and democrats are focused on getting it done because it’s good for society and the national priorities. They won’t focus on where the money goes, and will allow the money to go to run down republican states as economic stimulus. But you’ll notice it’s usually capital intense factories that end up in these situations, not white collar jobs.
Voters in Red states destroyed any motivation by foreign companies to build factories there (tariffs) and Democrats to focus infrastructure spending there (CHIPS, IRA being worthless in getting votes).
And now Republicans are ok with impounding Congressionally assigned funds.
So I guess outside of facebook brain rot and doom-scrolling, there is no way to convince voters to vote with policy (requires attention span of more than 30 seconds and high school level reading skills).
In Michigan, there were several IRA-catalyzed investments worth many billions for battery facilities or various components — and the announcements were met with vehement protests because some of the companies involved were Korean or Chinese. It didnt matter that they were going to create many thousand good jobs and use tons of local construction, the weird conspiratorial bigotry was just too strong (fanned by the now-President and VP).
Just no idea where to go from here. Feels really dire to be honest.
They still haven’t fully torn down a Texas Instruments plant in Stafford, TX that closed a decade ago. But now we’ve got an In and Out and Costco on the former campus.
Sure.. calculators and MSP430s for remote power meters are keeping TI from closing up shop, but TI doesn't have the capitalization structure to bring up a fab for the types of chips people say they want. I mean sure... If you want to make 28nm chips, they're fine, and you can do a lot with 1 and 2 GHz parts, but... We keep saying we want to make the chips in the states that they're making in Shenzhen and Taipei... And honestly, a $1.6B grant from daddy warbucks may not be enough to prevent TI from taking the money and dropping out of the program in a few years.
And this comes from a place of love... My family's been invested in GSI for almost 100 years
Readit News
> Unlike the costly bleeding edge 2 and 3 nanometer chips made by giants like TSMC, TI’s chips are made on cheaper, legacy nodes: 45 to 130 nanometers.
What's worse:
> Making chips takes an immense amount of water, and about a quarter of Texas is in drought. Luckily, Sherman has water rights to nearby Lake Texoma.
Indeed lucky for TI, but probably not so for area residents.
Lake Texoma has been hovering by the “full” mark pretty consistently for over 55 years. Recently, its water level has significantly declined to—wait for it—100% full!
If you monitor water maps, the east half of Texas’s water supplies don’t often get far outside of “full”.
More data: https://www.waterdatafortexas.org/reservoirs/individual/texo...
This is misleading, modern chip fabs recycle their water basically 100%. It's not being evaporated for cooling like in some data center deployments, it's just part of the process.
> TI will use about 1,700 gallons of water per minute when the new Sherman fab is complete, with plans to recycle at least 50% of that
Aren’t there plenty of areas where water is ample and land prices relatively cheap.
They already have fabs nearby, and so, fab suppliers/services in the area.
They have a large employee pool in the vicinity, with modest salary expectations.
The southern US mostly doesn't have blizzards and ice that regularly knocks out electric supply lines, and/or makes it impossible for employees to get to/from work for days/weeks at a time.
Water is about the cheapest resource around. Even in water-stressed areas (while it may cost several times what it would in wetter parts of the US) it's still an insignificant expense for any industry that doesn't need an absolutely obscene continual supply.
Roof-top PV solar power works out a lot better in the southern US than further north.
Dead Comment
How many bailouts is Intel on now?
The idea of forcing a merger between Intel and TMSC at what could be called be barrel of the gun, would at least make it (indirectly) Taiwan that would have to take over paying for Intel.
It didn't make sense.
Bailout?
Merging Intel and TSMC?
Sorry I am not following.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44801486
You have likely not experienced it as governments and monetary systems have absorbed these risks (ie. they have moved them elsewhere, hidden away, until some major explosion happens).
Ah, that locus whence political power comes?
And that the people responsible for their demise might leave with a parachute the stock holders won't (hi Boeing)
However making everything domestically just isn’t really viable for any country any more. The scale of our technological civilization and the diversity of goods and materials it depends on is more that any one continent can support, let alone one country.
It would be possible to collapse that down to one continent if absolutely necessary, but it would be incredibly economically painful and the US would need to give up on a lot of non-essentials and other priorities to devote resources to duplicating capacity that already exists elsewhere.
Or will some backroom deal be made without any Congressional approval? I got a lot of questions and basically there is no way to get answers since Republicans gave the president: 1. unilateral authority to set tax rates (tariffs and illegal export levies) 1. impound Congressionally appropriated funds on an ad-hoc basis 1. unilaterally close down federal agencies created by Congress
I refuse to debate the merits of this industrial policy while the above three things are true. There is nothing to debate here because no one outside the administration's inner circle (industrialists bribing) who knows what is going on.
I feel like my 7th grade Civics class has been a complete waste. Or, it lets me see what is happening in the correct light.
Dead Comment
Agriculture is self-evident, we need food on a daily basis to live. I don’t need three square microprocessors a day.
You don’t want to wait many years to tool up to make chips that go in weapons, either.
Else, you risk being structurally defeated very early, and this leads to others concluding that they can take you on. It undermines other preparations.
Even that isn't a given, because unless you have amassed a certain amount of technocratic and governmental competency chances are it can't compete even with government support and you just produce crony dysfunctional companies.
And of course there's economic trade offs. If you're politically ordering your economy to make chips, it doesn't make something else, and whatever it was making and trading for chips it was better at, and so you get fewer chips, that's comparative advantage. Industrial policy (and tariffs) do not increase aggregate production, they reduce it. And given that the circle of items you "can't do without" seems to be a bit of a moving target these days, at some point you're actually more brittle because you've replaced large chunks of the market with state production.
USPS is a great example of an organization that's managed to largely avoid this. Whenever you mention that people crawl out of the woodwork to complain about the 7 different times they lost their package, but their logistics at scale is still unmatched by the private sector, while also not completely negating the value of private sector alternatives (which so often is argued would happen if the government actively started doing anything new).
That's hubris. Although the US does indulge elective wars, one does not always get to choose with whom one will war.
[1] Edit to add: This was/is poorly worded - I mean that the US will only guarantee that you remain an ally while they are in some sense dependent on you, and while doing so they may work to break that dependence, which you may interpret as them trying to abandon you.
Deleted Comment
It won't be war. It'll be one-sided trade deals [1,2], and a slow erosion of economic and political sovereignty, culminating in a puppet state.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada-China_Promotion_and_Rec...
[2] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/fipa-agreement-with-china-wha...
Meanwhile cutting off your markets and wasting hundreds of billions on a long term bet with a small probability that another global war will happen is pretty dumb financial thinking.
Tariffs and corporate welfare will actively make a country poorer and create unproductive zombie markets while raising taxes on everyone. Not to mention diverting budgets and new revenue away from actual national security investment.
Those foundries didn't go away, they're still manufacturing with the same capabilities they used to (and they're much cheaper now since they're competing with the better ones in Taiwan.)
It's good to hear TI hasn't given up on high performance SOCs as it was beginning to look like they had. But most of this stuff is still here. Freescale and many other American companies are still making the same (better even) chips they always have which is more than enough for cruise missiles (more than enough for decent PDAs and smartphones really) even without "stockpiling."
I would be curious
I'm looking at China and what environmental price in the form of polluted land they pay and will be paying for a very long time. The big problems in Western countries also all originated in times with less or no regulation of such things. Just because that's not in the headlines all the time does not mean the problem is any less while the public is not paying attention.
When "it works" and overall success is the only criteria, the Vikings and Mongols surely count as extremely successful. Regulation is meant to take the price into account, in the cases of those two peoples millions of dead and a lot of pillaging and conquering. Regulation is definitely a burden, if you don't have to care about anything but the bottom line it's much easier.
Red states just say they're better for business.
The other reason is that while republican party is purposefully trying to destroy economies of blue states, democrats were not trying to purposefully destroy economy of red states.
The real answer is just politics. Blue states have (generally) healthy economies, with a variety of economic actors and many businesses. Businesses often will shop around various states to build a factory looking for tax cuts. The politician can be associated with new jobs, and the business gets a discount, so it appears to be a win-win (if you ignore the lack of tax revenue). No one needs a tax break to start a business in NYC, LA, nor Silicon Valley, so you don’t hear about all the businesses that open there.
Nationally, policies like the IRA are big boosters for the economy, and democrats are focused on getting it done because it’s good for society and the national priorities. They won’t focus on where the money goes, and will allow the money to go to run down republican states as economic stimulus. But you’ll notice it’s usually capital intense factories that end up in these situations, not white collar jobs.
Federal funds get funneled to red states to secure the votes of their representatives.
And now Republicans are ok with impounding Congressionally assigned funds.
So I guess outside of facebook brain rot and doom-scrolling, there is no way to convince voters to vote with policy (requires attention span of more than 30 seconds and high school level reading skills).
Just no idea where to go from here. Feels really dire to be honest.
https://www.politico.com/newsletters/power-switch/2024/09/13...
Chip manufacturing factories are traditionally called fabs, short for that.
The actual title of the article used the word "project" not "fabric"
Any reason to use "fabric" here?
So how much ownership is the US gov gonna get in this one?
And this comes from a place of love... My family's been invested in GSI for almost 100 years