US fab construction costs twice as much, takes twice as long as Taiwan
U.S. and Europe need to adopt new construction techniques to be competitive.
"A country with experience in fab construction can build one faster and cheaper than a country with no experience"
Yeah, not really surprising
If you thought GPUs were pricey now. At least the rest of the world can still buy from Taiwan.
Also because we dont have the construction experience of building FAB's, and we have different building regulation and standards.
25% tariffs on steel also wont make it any cheaper.
Yes, and with all that combined twice as expensive and twice longer is kinda fine. Provided it will function.
EDIT: Except if ever TSMC Taiwan foundries' monopoly is no more, this means loss of a very specific kind of shield of Taiwan's de facto independence, which may cause a lot of interesting developments.
Also because Taiwan has basically slave labor like China. Also things cost more here cuz our workers have benefits and things like rights.
You're getting downvoted, but I work in the industry (GF, Intel, TI, TEL, Screen) and have heard horror stories from people who have worked on TSMC and even Samsung sites.
“Right to work”
What benefits and rights are that supposed to be?
There’s a big cultural difference. Taiwanese workers, like Chinese, Korean, and Japanese workers as well, have a much higher tolerance for long work hours and less pay.
All of these East Asian cultures have long-standing social norms against complaining and refusing to work hard. It’s a collectivist culture of work that puts the success of the company ahead of the individual’s interests. In return, companies tend to be loyal to workers so it’s very common to stay at one company for your whole career.
We westerners used to have similar values back in the 1950s and earlier. That all changed during the counterculture.
You are correct, but people always want to believe their enemy's enemy is their friend, and if their enemy is ideological, then that enemy's enemy must be their ideological friend, and same with morality. That's never so.
Global foundries has a fab nearby, and all they produce are those chips for the old obsolete cars put out by Ford
Not everything has to be latest gen CPUs, there will always be a market for 555 timers and ESP32s
“Free trade” means letting everyone do what they’re best at and then exchange the goods they produce. This is so that everybody is focused on what works best in their country, everything is done as well and as cheaply as possible. However this makes no guarantee about any one country’s ability, at the end of the day, to stand alone without dependencies on others for vital goods. In fact if anything it works against that.
I don’t know why Trump talks about globalism as some Democrat thing. It’s his own party that has been driving for free trade since forever.
"Free trade" means big countries dominating smaller ones. In what way can a small Caribbean nation compete with the US for example? Say they have a self sustaining economy. They have farms to feed their people, and textile mills to clothe them. Free trade opens their markets up, and they are quickly overwhelmed by the mega corps and their economies of scale. Now local industry is driven out of business or subsumed by foreign competitors. Maybe tourism? Multinationals buy up all the hotels, beaches and restaurants. Locals get minimum wage jobs serving and cleaning. Any attempt at "protectionism" incurs penalties under the free trade agreements.
“Free trade” means letting everyone do what they’re best at and then exchange the goods they produce
If that were the case there would not be Plaza accords, dismemberment of Angstrom and the absolute annihilation of industry in the post-soviet states. "Free trade" is and always has been a fanciful banner for wealth extraction
Free trade is the best system for 90 % of an economy. I will take a dump on Trump any day, maybe twice , but having a small capacity to build your own silicon chip is mandatory in case of a military conflict. Covid wasn’t a planned military conflict and first world economies couldn’t produce mask, gown… and luckily the virus wasn’t so deadly and only a small % of the population died.
I am Canadian… by any free trade perspective it looks like we should buy our milk from countries with less harsh winter… but then we would be on our knee if an idiot decide to bully us with a duty tax.
There should be free trade for 90 % of a country gdp and elected officials can change their list of excluded 10 % every few years.
I don't know about the numbers you present, but absolutely agree that some industries are just worth supporting, from a government perspective. Cannot be reliant on a geopolitical enemy for goods that allow your country to continue to function.
I think Trump losing us allies is a travesty, but there's no guarantee during a global conflict you can get items from said allies.
All abstract ideas are good, and those with less assumptions are more abstract, but the problem is - nobody wants purely abstract ideas.
Pretty Victorian conditions in factories producing all those nice things we have, for example, would not be acceptable in USA.
Which means that this abstract idea is somehow mixed and divided with a border with another abstract idea.
Differently in one place and in another.
OK, I'm using a boring and long way to say that some things have to be balanced. Bad labor conditions allow cheaper production, skewing competitive balance. Tariffs or something like that can in theory balance it out back again.
EDIT: And yes, both globalism and American conservatism and what not are only in appearances divided along party lines, in fact they seem to be evenly split. Like with hedge funds, that's what makes your two-party system stable.
Trump is a former democrat. Many in his administration are former democrats. Trump isn't a liberal. Both Republicans and Democrats are liberal. Trump is a nationalist. Trump is not a liberal Republican.
For now.
Yep that 24/7 round-the-clock construction and experience in Taiwan surely would contribute significantly to the difference.