Thursday, August 6th 2020
US Aims to Bring Chip Manufacturing Industry Back to Its Soil
The US is one of the leading countries when it comes to chip design technologies and know-how; however, when it comes to actual manufacturing those designs, it's fallen from grace in recent years. Once the leader in both design and manufacturing, nowadays the US can only claim some 12% of the world's semiconductor production. The rest of it is mainly produced in Asia, where TSMC stands as the industry juggernaut, with other companies stretching across Taiwan, Japan, and most recently (and surging) China - the country has more than doubled its 300 mm manufacturing sites since 2017. This places some strain on the US' dependence from foreign shipments; and the country is looking to bridge that gap in its perceived national interests by investing heavily in silicon manufacturing to be brought back to the country. Recent slippages from Intel when it comes to keeping its manufacturing lead have apparently also instilled preoccupation amongst US policy makers.
The US Senate and House of Representatives have recently started converging around a bill that would pour taxpayer money into domestic chip production, laying a framework for $25bn worth of direct incentives to stimulate investment in manufacturing capacity, along with advanced research. This plan has been eagerly supported by Texas Republican John Cornyn and New York Democrat Chuck Schumer - representatives of two of the US states with the highest silicon manufacturing rates. However, it's expected that incentives covering some 20% to 30% of the total cost of any new fab and development investment are required to make the US a worthwhile consideration against other, more established countries with higher incentives, existing support logistics and infrastructure, and cheaper labor.
Source:
Financial Times
61 Comments on US Aims to Bring Chip Manufacturing Industry Back to Its Soil
If I had the chance, I would relocate to the US any day of the week.
Previously I thought that US had bigger salaries than EU since they usually have much more expensive real estate and housing, but that's not the case actually.
On average you pay about ~2700E/sq m in Germany or 1500E in eastern parts or 6100E in 7 large cities (Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Cologne, Frankfurt, Stuttgart and Düsseldorf) as per THIS LINK or one here, also here. Here we have a comparison with the rest of the EU countries.
On the other hand in the USA the average is 123$/sq ft or about 1120E/sq m as per here and here, or 153$/sq ft or 1394E/sq m shown here (this is median though).
This is at least twice (or more) cheaper than in Germany, on top of having bigger income on average as well.
Like I already said, given a chance I would move to US in a heartbeat.
I'm not saying we're not but had you grown up here, that CompSci degree (if you have one) would have already left you with sizable debt from the get go. I'm starting to feel like student loan debt was designed as the new age shackle and chain from yester year.
EU is funded and sustained by corrupt politics that exploits lives. This is not some problem like you have with Mexico or like anything to do with Africa for that matter. It's internal to EU and the laws make it real. People just look away or they don't care because "it's just Spain, not the EU". Or when similar things happen in Italy, "it's just Italy, not the EU"...... So, whenever it's convenient, whatever country like Poland or Italy or Spain, etc. do something horrible and EU doesn't do anything, it's considered not EU problem??? You must be joking.
Look at what other people are writing as well about the normal taxes. And that doesn't even include Value-added tax of on average 20%. That is just on top of the whole corruption that exploits people and mismanagement here.
You would never want to live in Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Bulgaria, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Czechia, Slovenia, Slovakia, Cyprus or Hungary as a US citizen. You would have a much worse life than in the US on top of all the taxes, and these are half of EU's countries.... So for real now, take your blindfold off about EU.
You still didn't show any statistics you claim you have. The other person with statistics posted a link where every country shows individually. That does absolutely nothing to represent the whole of EU. Don't misrepresent statistics.
And yes, you absolutely can. AMD used to have a fab in Dresden, Germany back in the day. What happened?
Now I image a similar story would be in the US as well. Then again people usually get the colleges they can't afford. You can attend (and finish) a much cheaper college with comparably same education, it just happens that people do not do that for some reason.
Especially in the CS field and IT in general, the amount you study on your own regardless of UNI is much more important that the actual degree, and mind you I was 3rd best student in my graduation year, and 2nd in my department (engineering), as practically all I did was study and work, sometimes have some fun. What made this possible is the fact that studying CS and programming was fun for me, so I was able to do it for long periods of time and enjoyed it very much.
Now, don't get me wrong, I know that for my particular case US is much better than EU, for a general case of an average person, it's pretty much the same, if anything, I'd say the EU is better for the average Joe as it provides much more stability and social safety.
EU is funded and sustained by corrupt politics that exploits lives. This is not like the problem you have with Mexico (at least you have more ways to control it) or like anything within Africa for that matter. It's internal to EU and the laws make it real. People just look away or they don't care because "it's just Spain, not the EU". Or when similar things happen in Italy, "it's just Italy, not the EU"...... So, whenever it's convenient, whenever a country like Poland or Italy or Spain, etc. do something horrible and EU doesn't do anything, it's considered not EU problem??? You must be joking.
Look at what other people are writing as well about the normal taxes. And that doesn't even include Value-added tax of on average 20%. That is just on top of the whole corruption that exploits people and mismanagement here.
You would never want to live in Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Bulgaria, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, Czechia, Slovenia, Slovakia, Cyprus, or Hungary as a US citizen and that's half of EU's countries. You still didn't show any of the statistics you claim to have seen. Somebody else posted statistics, but they were just of individual countries, that has absolutely nothing to say about EU as a whole. Statistics also almost always just look at "Western European" countries and they don't even look at those poorer countries, if they even get those statistics from them, or if they are even truthful in the first place. And of course EU wants to make it look as good as possible.
It's also very easy to obscure the inequality we have here, by only looking at each country individually. Show me a statistic that doesn't do that. Don't misrepresent statistics. I used to work with statistics and it's very easy to stumble into conclusions that are completely opposite to truth. EU is a clusterf**k of very poor and very rich countries, and there are totally failed countries in the middle of Europe like Serbia that EU doesn't even want to include because they are so poor. And EU can't even control their own countries. It's like having no control or real oversight over the cities in your country. It's more like 30 different neighbors fighting and bickering all the time but then just giving up, than a real country. EU is not even close to something I would call a union...
I can tell you from my experience in EU that the poorest people are much poorer than in the US, while the richest might not be as rich as the 1% in the US, but that's just 1%. As the large majority, I think we have way more inequality here in EU overall than US has. But even with your 1%, we have way poorer people in the EU than US has. But when it's convenient, we just look away or we don't compare Germany or UK to Bulgaria, Latvia or Portugal. You could argue that in each individual country the inequality is better than US (though you still wouldn't want to live in half of them), but on a whole it's a totally different story. There are also reasons why in the EU they don't compare say, Sweden to Greece in inequality because they are totally different states with their own politics for the most part. But also because it probably looks much better in the statistics. That's why I hate it when people say EU and treat it like a single country. Show me your statistics before this goes on even longer.
EDIT:
This paper proves my point completely, when you actually compare the countries to each other, EU has much higher inequality.
"Is Europe more unequal than the United States?
[...]
Our first result is that spatial inequalities have always been much smaller in the US than in Europe, at least since the mid-twentieth century. Figure 24 plots the ratio of the average income of the population-weighed top 10% countries or states to the population-weighed poorest 50% countries or states of Europe and the US respectively. This indicator is a simple measure of spatial inequality: it compares the average income of the “core” territories to that of the poorest states or countries gathering half of the total population. In Europe, inequalities between countries have decreased slightly from 1950 to the beginning of the 1980s and have remained broadly stable since then: in 2017, the national income of top 10% European countries was 2.8 times higher than that of the bottom 50%. Spatial heterogeneity has never reached such levels in the US, where the top 10% to bottom 50% ratio has decreased from 2.5 at the beginning of the 1930s to 1.5 in 2017.
These differences are apparent when comparing individual countries and states in recent years. The poorest European countries had national incomes per adult lower than the continental average by more than 50%, both in 1980 and in 2017 (figure A.4). There was no such equivalent in the US, neither today nor thirty years ago. In 1980, poorest US states were characterized by standards of living lower than the national average by no more than 25%, and this figure did not exceed 40% in 2017 (table A.7). Similarly, the wealthiest countries of Europe have steadily remained richer than the average European by about 75%, compared to only 25% in the US. There were, both in 1980 and 2017, small US states who were significantly richer than the rest of the country: in 1980, residents of Alaska and Washington D.C. earned more than 300% of US national income. Beyond these exceptions, however, a vast majority of states have always had standards of living located between 70% and 120% of the national average.
There are at least two potential explanations for these differences. [...] " And so on.
Here, they actually compare the individual countries and they show income in the EU is 2.8 times higher than the bottom 50%. In the US it's only 1.5 times higher today. And that the poorest in Europe are significantly poorer than in the US... You are being lied to or are trying your best to deliberately fool yourself and others.
Source: wid.world/document/bcg2019-full-paper/#page=48&zoom=100,96,869 (Quote from page 50)
And at least in the US, if you are poor, you have a chance to come out of poverty with hard work and dedication. For most people in EU it's often not possible at all because of language barriers. And often this leads to much more racism between countries than US has internally. EU has 30 countries with all different languages. There are problems here in EU that make your problems look easy, but nobody talks about them. Because people don't complain about EU politics at all like people in US complain about US politics. Not because these problems don't exist, we don't complain because every complaint is immediately shut down here. If you criticize the EU for doing something horrible, none of the countries ever feel responsible and the EU can't do much to force anyone to do anything.
When people from US talk about EU being better, they only look at the wealthy countries here. It's like only looking at the wealthy areas in the US and concluding US is much better. It's totally stupid to say something like this on both sides, but I much more often hear this from US towards EU than the other way around.
I'd rather have the crazy, emotional debates on a national stage like in US than sweep all these things under the rug as we do in EU and act like they are fine and normal. It doesn't make it fine or normal. It doesn't make anything better or effect improvement. You can say Trump says some s**t and complains a lot. But he also raised many problems and started a debate on immigration and how we treat other countries that do horrible things like China. I'd rather have that talk and people thinking about these problems at least than the other way around. Trump doesn't have the solutions but at least he doesn't shy away from talking about the problems. You as a country, or we as a world, need to solve these problems as a union in the end. If we don't talk about them, nothing happens and they get hidden under the rug.
I believe EU should really become one country like US and actually share the problems we have, or not be a union at all. Because at the moment, this "union" is not working. It's failing because of the reasons I mentioned. But I don't think it will happen any time soon, it's like a dream that will never materialize. Nice to think about, though, at least we have that. So yes, I'd also give it to Murica on that one.
In short, you have me confused with soneone else, because I didn’t compare. I said not to compare and to not pretend that our poorest are somehow not as poor as they are simply because you have poor in the EU.
- there's a great distance between poor and rich people in both Europe and USA ==> I agree with you
- Europe is NOT a federal country, unlike USA
- Europe does NOT allow people to travel borders between countries (especially poor ones)
Taking this into account, you need to consider that as European citizen, you have to compare your salary in your own country. That's where curves are flat in Europe, unlike in the US : it's the whole point.
A basic job in Ireland (like after University): 2k/month
An engineer job + 3 to 5 y of experience : 2k/month in any country like France, Germany, Italy
Everything (nearly) is also more expensive, so it's balanced, like in Iceland where the minimum wage is around 3000€ but everything costs twice the price of the continent or more.
This is what Shengen space is for : different salaries but same living costs (approximately). Poland is not in Shengen, neither Romania.
And even inside Shengen space, there's regulation, like you can't buy stuff in Spain and flew back to France with tons of cigarettes, it's limited per travel (it's especially true for the spanish border).
And yes, there's job paid like slavery, even for a white man like me. As a intern, you have to be paid around 500€/month if your internship lasts more than a certain length of time. But companies cut those contracts into smaller ones, so you're not paid. It tends to disappear, but it still exists. And even paid, you can work extra hours and you won't be paid.
As an intern in my last year as student in engineering, I was earning ... wait for it... 2€/ hour.
Not legal, not recognized by the company, it was all for myself so I could climb the ladder to Expertise faster, but I was Expert after only 3 years (instead of 8 to 10 years). Still not paid like one, but working as equals with them (I made very good personal friends).
And I can now do the job I want ==> no price tag on that
I can't find something to sum up what is said on this topic, but I think if I had to say something it would be : "It doesn't matter if they get the factories back in the US, it won't change the global economical problem of the US". It's so capitalist that, seen from outside, it's like people earn a lot, but everything cost a leg ... Education, health, rent, as mentioned before, it's unbalanced as hell. Unlike in Europe where rich place = high prices and poorer place = lower prices.
Switzerland is a great example of this kind of differences and many people live near the border, at 1 hour of their homes so they are payed twice or three times the salary in their countries (I could get a 10k/month easy in Switzerland).
At any rate, what you are truly looking for is population below the poverty line. By the CIA world factbook (the most optimistic estimate available, arguably), it's 15.1% for the USA, 9.8% for the EU. /debate
www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/us.html
www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/ee.html
I love my country. But I will not refuse to acknowledge it's weak spots either. That would be akin to being a bad parent.
Processor manufacturing is all animated so doubt it matters where that happens.
Cheapest electric.
Get back to the topic.
Thank You and have a Good Day...
As I understand it, it went sideways because people read the article (for once), and not only the title, leading to see that's a politic decision which was based on Intel (probably) recommendations ; as I understand it, since Intel have it's own fabs and is US based.
So what everybody thought was : "hey, they try to cut out China or whatever, and bring some jobs on US soil".
Some answer were : "it won't resolve anything about US employment nor economy actual problems". We had to expose that other countries are not fearing that kind of threat, because it's not something for the economy, it's about strategy.
But, and that's the whole point, this decision leads to higher prices on silicon (in theory), which was the point of comparison between different people, and what turned bad.
If at this point, I'm getting it wrong, I'd be grateful to read what I should have understand from the article. For my own sake.
And If you want to share, I think I'm not the only one interested. Sincerely.