Readit NewsNot that it's unthinkable or anything, but my impression is that people are not quite aware that it ain't free.
It allready collects few hubdred million per year, spends like 10 on wikipedia itself and rest goes for political projects. They could do something useful for once.
(On a side note: all those money and they dont use it to track the cliques / country level actors across admins...)
It should close itself before elections to burn the politicians that try to screw it.
So yes, US companies do have a choice. They can lobby Congress to cut off TSMC from their main hardware and parts supplier entirely, crippling it altogether, except for their Arizona plant which is ripe for nationalization for natsec.
They also have 50 billion dollars in debt, and their cash flow situation has gotten so desperate that slices of future fab revenue have been pawned off to private equity, who now has a senior claim on the assets (as do the bondholders).
An equity stake and Intel is not something that a TSMC would want without coercion. It's just not a very attractive place to be an equity holder.
>Get rid of some dead weight, write off the bad investments, improve their foundry business and their value easily grows multiples of what it currently is.
As if it was that easy. The company has now been through multiple CEOs attempting to mix up these ideas in various ways. The last CEO tried to do a Hail Mary to improve the foundry business, but the balance sheet can't support it. Now the new CEO is essentially writing off those investments and putting them on the back burner. Considering that, getting rid of the dead weight will be difficult, considering the company itself is largely dead weight... The quality of their employees is not good, or at least not nearly at the level that needs to be (18A yields are alarmingly low, and that's the critical product that basically determines the company's future. 14a is already looking more and more distant despite it being the purported savior not even a year ago).
Realistically, their financial situation puts them right at the precipice of needing to shed the fabs, and/or permanently continue down the path of more Brookstone-like partnerships where they can spread the burden (which then caps the equity holder upside).
There is nothing "easy" about the current situation. Maybe without the 50 billion in debt, but nearly all of remedial paths are running into nasty balance sheet constraints. There's no more room to spend quarters rejiggering the thing.
Current CEO has no plan, sabotaged the idea of last one and cries on twitter. Not a good outlook.
TSMC can just wait Trump out.
I think the reason why we don't see aliens is that intelligent life isn't sustainable long-term, and there's a long list of reasons why intelligence leads to self-destruction.
And those in politics are not interested in change since because (the cynical part starts here) they are selected / sponsored by billionaires who own the media, or go to politics as a job and not to help anyone but themselves
On a side note storing fat to feed the brain in case of bad times makes sense. In the past there were no convinience stores, nor refridgerators
The new person could show how unproductive they are.
Worth noting that Intel is the only company that had these kinds of shenanigans pulled with their grant. Samsung, TSMC, Micron and others were granted similar funds without any kind of withholding or demands for equity from the federal government.
This stock can later be sold, to benefit the taxpayer.