Where the CHIPS Act money has gone
Where the CHIPS Act money has gone
The idea of this act wasn't to make chips cheaper. It was to bring semiconductor manufacturing home instead of relying on China. They were always going to be more expensive because we can't compete with slave labor or a complete lack of environmental regulations. Price was the reason we were making them in China in the first place.
What chips were we making in China? Unless you're counting Taiwan as China, but I'd point out that we're still making the top of the line chips in Taiwan.
Like, the vast majority of the less interesting, non-cutting-edge stuff. The PRC does have fabs and everything; it’s just that they are several generations back from cutting edge. And nobody wants to stick their really cutting edge tech into a mainland Chinese factory, because they’ve got an established pattern and practice of outright stealing and reverse-engineering anything interesting they can get their hands on. They don’t give a shit about any IP rules unless it’s their rules.
I work in semiconductors, and I don't think the numbers are necessarily unfair. There are a lot of small companies and academic research labs receiving funding from the CHIPS act, and their work gets done faster when there are fabs in the country to tape out their designs.
Can't say I know a ton about the industry but it's wild how many fabless companies are so influential. So much of business is vertical integration, yet many of the biggest names in chips are fabless
Chip fabs simply do not work at a small scale, if you want to sell them at anything resembling a reasonable cost. Modern chip lithography takes a truly titanic amount of capital to set up, and it takes years. And by then the industry has moved on.
look at how much a new fab costs now.
Yeah, I don't know what people expected.
Building production capability is obscenely expensive and can inherently really only be done by a handful of companies at a time if they want any hope of getting their investment back. They need a crazy amount of volume to pay for that facility. You can't invest tax dollars in 100 facilities. It doesn't work.
Shareholder dividends
More like stock buybacks
Well for us it forced us to go find US vendors and make our product 10 times more expensive. At the same time we were asked to make our product less expensive. So we are currently near the brink of extinction. Also we never got any money, we were just janked around by the big players wanting that money if their product is us made. Fantastic! Okay any feet left to shoot? Shall we ask that all movies be American made only? Or maybe all Netflix movies should be American made only.
Had it where I work as well through Buy America Build America. I ended up put a lot of extra stainless steel in the design so we could hit the right numbers.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Since the passage of the CHIPS and Science Act last August, eight companies have already received more than half of the planned government direct funding.
These companies have collectively received $29.34 billion in funding through the CHIPS Act for semiconductor factories across the country.
As of writing, Intel, Micron, Global Foundries, Polar Semiconductor, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), Samsung, BAE Systems, and Microchip Technology have been the direct beneficiaries of the law.
Intel received the biggest direct investment through the CHIPS Act, with $8.5 billion for its semiconductor projects.
She said the department is prioritizing projects that will be operational by 2030 and some “very strong” proposals from companies may never get funding through the act.
The Biden administration announced in February that it will also start funding research into substrate packaging technologies, which would help create more leading-edge semiconductors.
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