US Senate approves massive $52B spend on easing the chip shortage

ManofGod said:
Just as likely as when Verizon took all that money to build out the FIOS network and ran away with the money, all without an expanded network.
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Verizon: "We're going to spend $7B on infrastructure this year."
Gov't: "Here's another $20M."
Verizon: "We're going to spend $7.02B on infrastructure this year."
*FIOS boundaries expand by 1 neighborhood per city*
Taxpayer: "Verizon stole our monies! I don't have FIOS!"
 
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sfsuphysics said:
I know you didn't write this article, but how do you get a net positive water usage? Like how do you end up getting more water than what you started with? If they're in some way capturing rainwater I wouldn't exactly call that a positive water use as that rainwater is not going into the environment.
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If you read the article, it links to a puff piece by Intel, where they mention several things including releasing dammed water, getting rid of invasive plant species to restore water flow into a river, fixing leaky irrigation ditches (which IIRC has been an issue in Arizona for decades), helping set up rainwater catchment, and stuff like that.
 
This is a much better use of Gov money then bailing out bankers who make bad bets with other peoples money.

Of course this won't solve anything for the next few years. However we need more chip production in the western world. This chip shortage really doesn't have a ton to do with pandemics imo. Shortages on PC parts has more to do with tariffs on many products out of China... fully completed laptops, touch screens ect where directly effected. In the case of laptops and desktops as an example tariffs stopped 100s of thousands of HP Lenovo Dell and others product from coming into the US. Many of these companies then became purchasers of retail boards cpus and the like as they tried to make up for the shortfall.

Anyway its important that we build out more home production... because such things will happen again. Pandemics lets hope not... but sanctions, ya those are going continue/be repeated into the future. And of course demand is only going to grow as more products become smarter... people are expecting faster and faster smart things, that require more complicated silicon. No more putting 5 year old 22nm chips in those refrigerators. lol /jk
 
ChadD said:
Of course this won't solve anything for the next few years
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Yes? this is a fairlyobvious statement, and people (i mean in general, not trying to single you out) should tone it down when saying it. As an example, one political party in the US spent twenty years saying "even if you safter building a new oil refinery now, it won't be ready for a decade." If they had been ignored, we'd have had those refineries ten years ago.

Note: i didn't mention which party in the hope of minimizing thread jacking about politics, but because it's an example of the problem with the focus on how long it will take to do whatever. Substitute rural access to broadband, or something different, that you don't care about, if this example bothers you, please.
 
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1_rick said:
Yes? this is a fairlyobvious statement, and people (i mean in general, not trying to single you out) should tone it down when saying it. As an example, one political party in the US spent twenty years saying "even if you safter building a new oil refinery now, it won't be ready for a decade." If they had been ignored, we'd have had those refineries ten years ago.

Note: i didn't mention which party in the hope of minimizing thread jacking about politics, but because it's an example of the problem with the focus on how long it will take to do whatever. Substitute rural access to broadband, or something different, that you don't care about, if this example bothers you, please.
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Indeed China thinks 50 years out. If we are going to compete with them long term we need too as well.
 
zamardii12 said:
" with more foundry capacity arising on home turf in the United States. It will be a slow process as getting new fabs up and running and old ones updated takes time, but it will eventually help ease a global reliance on manufacturing in Taipei, South Korea, and China."

It's basically an investment in foundries and other things to improve chip making in the US.
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With the added benefit that an essential resource can be nationalized in war time. It’s both essential for the industry, and the war department.
 
ChadD said:
Indeed China thinks 50 years out. If we are going to compete with them long term we need too as well.
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We’ve been so focused on short term gains and investor return that we shot ourselves in the foot. We basically outsourced critical manufacturing of critical components to a country which has a government that’s not friendly to us.
 
1_rick said:
If you read the article, it links to a puff piece by Intel, where they mention several things including releasing dammed water, getting rid of invasive plant species to restore water flow into a river, fixing leaky irrigation ditches (which IIRC has been an issue in Arizona for decades), helping set up rainwater catchment, and stuff like that.
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So it's stuff that technically could have been done without the fab plant, except for the fact that people never want to pay for boring shit like water infrastructure. Don't get me wrong, bravo that those were part of the terms and conditions to Intel opening up the plant, but it's really not a net positive output source.
 
Thinking it over a bit, imagine the position Intel would be in had they spent the 30B they sank into share buyback back in like 2017-2019 into 30B of US Fab expansion. They would just be bringing new capacity online now in the middle of the shortage, and they wouldn’t need a govt hand out. That would have been a hell of a lot better for the share holders…

maybe instead of giving the money to Intel, the govt should just give the Intel engineers a kick ass offer and build the chips themselves. At least we would get something out of the money.
 
So 52 billion you say....

I think the true numbers are 50 billion goes to politicians slush, cronies, and crook projects

2 billion actually makes it to the fabs

This tends to be 100% accurate in todays America

So who lobbied this? Ford? Tesla? Intel? Good on them. Apparently the biggest sector hit is automotive.
 
tangoseal said:
So 52 billion you say....

I think the true numbers are 50 billion goes to politicians slush, cronies, and crook projects

2 billion actually makes it to the fabs

This tends to be 100% accurate in todays America

So who lobbied this? Ford? Tesla? Intel? Good on them. Apparently the biggest sector hit is automotive.
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You know the money isn't going to build any actual foundries since they cost $20b+. I'll have to take a look at the bill as I'm sure a parasitic bureaucracy was setup to handle the money.
 
Why isn't this a matter of national security? At this day and age, any money the US govt wants to spend to help alleviate "shortages" should be focused on US based fab plants. If the world shut it down to go against us, it would be chaos.
 
Armenius said:
You know the money isn't going to build any actual foundries since they cost $20b+. I'll have to take a look at the bill as I'm sure a parasitic bureaucracy was setup to handle the money.
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Yeah, screams of Solyndra 2.0 back when "Global Warming" was an imminent threat to humanity. Yet, even after a FBI investigation no one went to prison for it. I expect no accountability this time again.
 
Two things the Gubment is good at, spending your tax dollars on stupid shit & lying.

I don't see this being any different, nor do I see the "chip shortage" ending any time soon.
 
Krenum said:
Two things the Gubment is good at, spending your tax dollars on stupid shit & lying.

I don't see this being any different, nor do I see the "chip shortage" ending any time soon.
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Looks like Intel sucks at managing their money for potential adversity or smart investments for the future.

if private industry is a disaster of mismanagement, what is left?
 
Lakados said:
A single modern fab costs upwards of $30B to build and get operational
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TSMC is building a plant 3 miles away from me here in Arizona. Pricetag: 7 billion$. Not $10bil, not $20bil, not $30bil. They had already announced a second plant in the state. This happened before this bill. Without this bill.

Intel and TSMC are swimming in profits and available cash. While I'm happy to see U.S. plants pop up...I still don't understand why the taxpayers are donating $40 billion to already-crazy-lucrative chip firms. Power of lobbyists win again. We can be sure some politicians are going to get some of that green back, thru the swamp.

A dark day in America...they are coming at us in waves now.
 
I think it's important. For future shortages, US economy, national security, etc.

Better than spending it on bombs or $10,000 dollar toilet seats like they usually do.
 
Semiconductor demand is only going to get greater. I, for one, am happy to see some additional fabs being built stateside. Without getting political, the United States needs to stop outsourcing the means of production so much, even if it means prices are a bit higher. I'd rather not farm out our future to the lowest bidder, as it stands today.
 
IceCaveMan said:
TSMC is building a plant 3 miles away from me here in Arizona. Pricetag: 7 billion$. Not $10bil, not $20bil, not $30bil. They had already announced a second plant in the state. This happened before this bill. Without this bill.

Intel and TSMC are swimming in profits and available cash. While I'm happy to see U.S. plants pop up...I still don't understand why the taxpayers are donating $40 billion to already-crazy-lucrative chip firms. Power of lobbyists win again. We can be sure some politicians are going to get some of that green back, thru the swamp.

A dark day in America...they are coming at us in waves now.
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TSMC’s own press release states they hope to spend 12B out of pocket and have the rest covered by their stake in the 56B. Hoping for it to be online for 2024. Not sure where you get 7B from.

“
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd.’s planned Phoenix manufacturing plant will likely be three times larger than was originally announced.

The cost to build the manufacturing facility is likely to be closer to $35 billion, nearly triple the $12 billion first announced, according to sources with knowledge of the deal”

original: https://udn.com/news/story/7240/5284669
ABC synopsis of the original: https://www.google.ca/amp/s/www.abc...es-larger-than-originally-announced?_amp=true
 
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Lakados said:
TSMC’s own press release states they hope to spend 12B out of pocket and have the rest covered by their stake in the 56B. Hoping for it to be online for 2024. Not sure where you get 7B from.
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Maybe from the news I've been tracking every week or two? It's right in my backyard.Originally the plant was going to be for 7nm chips. In the past month or so the plans explicitly switched to 5nm chips.

Conflating the cost of the fab and the financial incentives to bring that here...two different things.

Prior to all the extra cash-o-rama, here is a straightforward summary (derived from the original announcement)
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/tsmc-budget-fab-expansion-randd-foundry
 
IceCaveMan said:
Maybe from the news I've been tracking every week or two? It's right in my backyard.Originally the plant was going to be for 7nm chips. In the past month or so the plans explicitly switched to 5nm chips.

Conflating the cost of the fab and the financial incentives to bring that here...two different things.

Prior to all the extra cash-o-rama, here is a straightforward summary (from the original announcement)
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/tsmc-budget-fab-expansion-randd-foundry
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Not sure I would call May 2020 recent.
https://www.google.ca/amp/s/www.zdn...cle/tsmc-to-drop-12-billion-on-arizona-plant/

I see your confusion, that 7B is increasing their annual budget from 4 to 7 on their existing facilities. Land purchases for future sites or increased costs on raw materials would also fit into that increased budget.
 
madpistol said:
Semiconductor demand is only going to get greater. I, for one, am happy to see some additional fabs being built stateside. Without getting political, the United States needs to stop outsourcing the means of production so much, even if it means prices are a bit higher. I'd rather not farm out our future to the lowest bidder, as it stands today.
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Very true. Technology is moving faster than ever before. Expect some wild innovation this decade, especially with automation and some sort of flying cars soon too. But we can't do it if we can't build it.
 
Revenant_Knight said:
It’s both essential for the industry, and the war department.
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A sure supply of chips are, certainly. But this swamp money was unnecessary to achieve the goal. But hey, if the government is baililng out Jeff Bezos "Blue Origin" with untold billions...what other filthy rich corp/person should we lather up in sticky cash?
 
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