I’ll be honest: there is a very good chance this won’t work .... At the same time, the China concerns are real, Intel Foundry needs a guarantee of existence to even court customers, and there really is no coming back from an exit. There won’t be a startup to fill Intel’s place. The U.S. will be completely dependent on foreign companies for the most important products on earth, and while everything may seem fine for the next five, ten, or even fifteen years, the seeds of that failure will eventually sprout, just like those 2007 seeds sprouted for Intel over the last couple of years. The only difference is that the repercussions of this failure will be catastrophic not for the U.S.’s leading semiconductor company, but for the U.S. itself.
Very well argued. It's such a stunning dereliction the US let things get to this point. We were doing the "pivot to Asia" over a decade ago but no one thought to find TSMC on a map and ask whether Intel was driving itself into the dirt? "For want of a nail the kingdom was lost" but in this case the nail is like your entire metallurgical industry outsourced to the territory you plan on fighting over.
I believe something similar is happening in drug development right now. It may take less than 5, 10, 15 years to see the impact to the US. But from someone who has a vantage point to see it across many parts of the industry, including having seen the evolution of Intel / TSMC, I think it is a very similar story. Right now is like 2007 (or maybe even a bit later) for therapeutics. In the future, we will look back on this year as the year we gave it up.
Most new drugs come from biotechs nowadays (not all of them, not GLP-1’s). But many do. If that innovation is happening in China and not the US today then it will create an issue in several years. We will not control our supply chain for a critical set of goods.