America’s semiconductor boom

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-jt3qBzJ4A

106•zdw•5h ago

Comments

AxiomaticSpace•3h ago

This is just anecdote, but my roommate's dad works in construction management specifically for semiconductor fabs, and he was working for about a year on one of Intel's new fabs in Arizona up until a few months ago when the entire project was suddenly scrapped. IIRC he got the sense it was someone high up in intel that decided to pull the plug on it.

maplant•2h ago

I mean, not to sound rude, but of course it would be someone high up who would make that decision. It’s not like a grunt could decide to scrap a whole new fab

vivalahn•2h ago

I could be wrong but I’d assume what the OP is trying to say is that the leadership of these companies does not want these fabs to actually open and work. That something transpired maybe between them and govt.

bee_rider•2h ago

No, it was me, sorry, I was dropping off the sand for the chips. Couldn’t find this Airyzone place so I gave up and made a nice sandcastle instead. It was definitely a premium sandcastle, but the tide took it away.

AxiomaticSpace•2h ago

Yea fair. What I was trying to say was that it seemed like a decision that was less the construction/development team saying "this plan isn't workable for xyz reason and we need to reconsider our approach" and more someone high up saying "we are cancelling this and we won't say why".

dboreham•2h ago

I left the semiconductor industry 30 years ago but back then every company had "a fab that hasn't been completed in Arizona" that people would talk fondly of perhaps opening one day if business picks up. Seems like not much has changed.

itsnowandnever•2h ago

I always thought it was funny that for my entire lifetime people have talked about Arizona being perfect for fabs because it's dry there and not subject to tremors meanwhile Taiwan where 60% of all chips are produced (and 90% of the most sensitive ones) is tropical and has earthquakes fairly frequently.

ansk•2h ago

I can only imagine what the Taiwanese can do in Arizona. Truly a synergy for the ages.

foobarian•2h ago

Maybe that's why yields there are better? [1]

[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/ts...

dwd•1h ago

Once you're in a air-conditioned environment the outside world doesn't matter.

More likely he compared the 4nm yield to the 3nm yield in Taiwan?

coliveira•1h ago

Why do you think the Chinese people from Taiwan want to do anything in Arizona? They're there just to placate the orange guy's rage. They'll never do anything special there.

_carbyau_•1h ago

Then why would nations around the world protect Taiwan?

hshdhdhehd•2h ago

Maybe chaos monkeys help innovation

nebula8804•1h ago

Chaos monkey yes...but more like desperation for survival. Its the same mentality that drives Israel. As been shown a few times, it mutates into a sick culture with unintended consequences...but obviously it does produce results.

tonyhart7•1h ago

"death river strategy"

WillPostForFood•47m ago

https://www.azcentral.com/story/money/business/tech/2025/10/...

ojbyrne•2h ago

New CEO started in March, I vaguely recall him cancelling fabs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lip-Bu_Tan

x3n0ph3n3•1h ago

So are they going to give back the money they got from the feds to build them?

eclipticplane•54m ago

lol.

re-thc•50m ago

The govt got shares instead already

WillPostForFood•48m ago

Intel didn't cancel any fabs in Arizona, one just came online. They killed plans Fabs in Poland and Germany, and the Ohio fab is on hold. You don't get the money up front, so nothing to give back.

ggm•1h ago

Fabs need pretty solid foundations IIRC, the systems don't like vibration. So this won't have been a cheap build. I also believe the construction methods for clean room is like a VOC purge on steroids. Whatever else goes into this build would have a huge impact on potentially reclaiming it for VLSI.

tonyhart7•1h ago

well, intel is loser on semiconductor boom

pjob•25m ago

https://www.wsj.com/tech/intels-chips-act-requirements-waive...

https://archive.is/nhLyB

echelon•2h ago

Is America's semiconductor boom real?

How much capacity are we building?

What processes? What types of semiconductor products? High end? Middle? Low?

How much capacity?

Can we substitute or replace Taiwan in the future in the event of conflict?

I can't watch the video right now, but I'm curious about its claims. Or any additional HNer context.

phendrenad2•2h ago

This video has lots of details, but conspicuously absent is exactly WHAT chips are being made in Arizona. I guess it's still a closely-guarded secret for some reason.

coliveira•1h ago

It's not the high-end type. Otherwise they would announce it.

fungi•2h ago

how competitive will american made cpu's be? will american consumers just end up paying n * more for same product that the rest of the world gets from taiwan?

bee_rider•2h ago

I don’t think the mix of engineers we’ve been producing is right for this. We need a whole generation of folks at a higher hardware:software ratio. Check back in a decade to see if we’ve seriously started.

edverma2•2h ago

Does America need to produce the talent or can they import it?

epistasis•2h ago

The talent is already here, the employers just need to pay better.

__MatrixMan__•1h ago

And attract them away from what? What are these skilled people doing? Does a photolithography skill set enable you to moonlight at some other gig such that they're here and keeping their skills fresh and we're just not noticing?

georgeburdell•1h ago

I was a fab tool owner. My last paycheck in a semiconductor position was in the mid-200s. I went into software and make double that in the same metro. Same level of responsibility. I don’t even work in machine learning.

To take your photolithography example though, I know someone who went litho tool owner -> camera team at Apple -> Meta reality labs. FAANGs want semiconductor process engineers just so they can spend all day yelling at underpaid Asian vendor semiconductor process engineers who are doing the actual work.

rangestransform•2h ago

America could import it if the current administration wasn’t so hell bent on repelling global talent through inflicting great cost and uncertainty upon the talent

chris_wot•2h ago

Well, they can't import it any more.

coliveira•1h ago

They cannot produce it (in large quantities) and it's getting harder and harder to import talent.

Spooky23•41m ago

I worked at a US college that had a big semiconductor engineering and manufacturing engineering program. They were about 20-30% international, but the program wasn’t huge.

Frankly, it’s shitty work. Software is where it’s at. Hardware people get paid peanuts and work really hard. When you’re a master of a particular technology, you get discarded when the next thing comes along. Ask the people at Intel or IBM. The best jobs are the execs and the tradesmen.

yieldcrv•2h ago

Have you seen how much of a premium Americans are already paying for chips in the face of constrained supply?

Gamers are still buying them and so is everyone else

Given that this is the same curiosity and question since pre-pandemic and now we have many examples of a premium, I think its not a real worry as long as the chips perform

walsh404•2h ago

Get ready for your 8 year repayment plan with TMOBILE!

coliveira•1h ago

Of course cost is an issue. If costs are higher than in Asia, everybody else in the world is going to buy Asian chips, not American ones.

nebula8804•1h ago

I keep seeing this in every industry. "We can't give up America because they buy so much"

"China needs the American market because they can't make up the numbers for the rest of the world combined in the short term"

Can people here help answer where the heck does everyone have the money to buy all this stuff? Especially post COVID with all the layoffs? The US is only 5% of the world population. Europe isn't that poor and many chunks of Asia have a lot of wealth now. Yet America's appetite and more importantly capability of absorbing all manner of goods remains unimpaired...how?!

yieldcrv•51m ago

Its pretty impressive and brings you into macroeconomics and monetary policy

Its a long answer but there are many winners in every financial environment in America, while the short answer is that nobody knows how they have money en masse to buy stuff

and the whole system is based on incentivizing them to move that money around the economy, as opposed to collect and save it in a bank account

WillPostForFood•43m ago

Yes there have been post-Covid layoffs, but unemployment is 4.3%, roughly at the "full employment" level, and only up 1 point from the post-Covid low.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE

ojbyrne•2h ago

I am guessing that it’s a highly automated process, so per unit costs are not going to be affected much by the cost of labor.

phendrenad2•1h ago

This is actually a good video (I say actually because this youtuber sometimes has surface-level reporting on things, but this one is quite a bit better).

It's investigative on-the-ground reporting of the TSMC plant in Arizona, and the recent SemiCon West conference.

darquomiahw•1h ago

What's TSMC's headcount down in AZ? I ask because Intel has laid off or retired around 40k employees in the past two years and they still need to cut a little more to please the new boss.

alephnerd•1h ago

Ime, most of those cuts were employees working on legacy nodes and processes - especially at Beaverton.

Daub•11m ago

If you haven't already, I encourage you to subscribe this guys channel - Asianometry. How he finds the time to reserach in such detail such a wide range of tek-related subjects is beyond me.

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