alt.hn

1/11/2025 at 3:45:51 PM

TSMC begins producing 4-nanometer chips in Arizona

 https://www.reuters.com/technology/tsmc-begins-producing-4-nanometer-chips-arizona-raimondo-says-2025-01-10/

by heresie-dabord

1/15/2025 at 8:38:02 AM

About time.

I seem to recall some detail about how they don't do the packaging, and that' still on the mother island.

This suggests that may be the case: https://www.theregister.com/2024/10/04/tsmc_amkor_arizona/

It's a move in the right direction, but not as much as may be needed.

by Over2Chars

1/15/2025 at 12:33:53 PM

Packaging isn't done by TSMC.

Packaging is extremely low value and commodified, so companies prefer to contract it out to OSATs like Amkor.

Same reason why most companies became fabless - margins are much more competitive this way compared to owning your own fab.

by alephnerd

1/15/2025 at 2:26:10 PM

This margin-oriented mindset is arguably one of the driving factors that makes the US lose its industrial base.

by typ

1/15/2025 at 3:45:44 PM

No, its a global product silicon chips, america ships em to 100+ countries and will lose its edge if it doesnt stay at the top.

Margins are crucial for this, the driving factor that made US lose its industrial base, is red-tape, red-tape, red-tape, red-tape, political interference, militant unionism (unions are good and fine, militant unions are not), and foolish gov laws which did not make sure that labour standards are consistent for all products in american market, to make sure slave-labour or extremely shoddy labour standard based countries do not erode away great american jobs and its industrial base.

Margins are fine, and good. Unfair competition, rules and red-tape for domestic manufacturers but none for foreign companies, is what killed it.

It’s cheaper for a chinese company to ship to american households than it is for a local american company to an american household… , this is purely because of crazy gov regulations.

by teitoklien

1/15/2025 at 11:36:33 PM

Government regulations (like not polluting the water or forcing your workers into 40 hours a week of unpaid overtime) may be part of it. But China has been known to "dump" commodities into foreign markets to destroy those markets

Here's one random article I quacked, and this issue has been going on for years it ain't new: https://edition.cnn.com/2024/03/28/business/china-goods-expo...

China has also devalued its currency to facilitate this dumping spree

Another random quack (more on the how than history, but the impacts are detailed) https://gbtimes.com/how-does-china-devalue-their-currency/

So the narrative that "the US is choking itself with silly regulations and can't compete as a result" is a pure fiction afaict.

by Over2Chars

1/16/2025 at 3:45:23 PM

> So the narrative that "the US is choking itself with silly regulations and can't compete as a result" is a pure fiction afaict.

No its not fiction, you just said China did this, China did that… Well USA is a country too, why cant it shape policies to advantage the US industrial base ? It can, it chooses not to, out of apathy for the masses.

> not polluting the water or forcing your workers into 40 hours a week of unpaid overtime

Has nothing to do with that, USA has the largest tech ecosystem with silicon valley being at the top, its a huge software ecosystem base, and from end to end, from the beginning to the end, united states governments have carefully co-ordinated to make sure America stays at the top in Software, and it has done so successfully by making one of the most robust and risk-taking investment ecosystem on planet earth.

It could do the same for Manufacturing, polluting water or slave labour taunts are just the boogeyman, the problem is it taking 10 yrs to get enough permits or land allocation for building anything serious industrial, ill-conceived regulations, etc.

People keep mentioning Water Pollution or 40 hour slave labours, yet no one ever mentions the after-math of america’s de-industrialization, the countless rural towns and families in rust-belt who were decimated and completely broken in this process. They resort to drugs just to keep themselves alive, and even that now kills them with overdose with stuff like fetanyl.

Domestic manufacturing stuff does not need slave labour, it needs fair level playing field, which begins with not letting goods made with slave labour or as you said goods made by skirting corners like polluting local water. Americans can perfectly figure out how to scale and optimize things without resorting to slave labour. But they need atleast a level playing field to even be able to survive initially.

by teitoklien

1/17/2025 at 11:32:55 AM

Trump says he wants to bring manufacturing back. Let's see what happens.

by Over2Chars

1/15/2025 at 2:44:35 PM

Companies in every country have this mindset.

Even Taiwan has largely offshored packaging to ASEAN, China, and India. And Taiwan got packaging because the Japanese manufacturers offshored to there.

by alephnerd

1/15/2025 at 3:34:44 PM

The difference is that only recently with the CHIPS Act did the US gov't put money to support strategic industries at large scale.

The US in its history after the 60's would invent a lot of core industrial tech, but then we'd let Japan, Germany, etc. actually commercialize because we didn't want to pick winners.

We invented CNC machining, SMT / pick-n-place for PCBs, industrial robot arms, etc., and these were all American dominated, but foreign countries supported homegrown companies long-term, and those American companies went bust.

by nickpinkston

1/15/2025 at 3:21:38 PM

Aren’t Intel and Samsung doing packaging research in the US?

by selimthegrim

1/15/2025 at 3:30:10 PM

The research capacity for almost everything semiconductors related was almost always in the US, but before the CHIPS act, there wasn't much of an incentive to invest in expanding that capacity here (aside from Texas and Arizona, who had very strong semiconductor public-private programs), because the margins are just too dang low to attract any private investment domestically.

The semiconductor industry is multifaceted, and it's very difficult to be competitive in every single segment of it.

For example, Taiwan does great at fabrication, but is horrid at chip design. Israel and India are major chip design hubs but are horrid at fabrication. Malaysia is THE packaging and testing hub, but weak at fabrication and nonexistent in design.

by alephnerd

1/15/2025 at 6:20:47 PM

NY?

by selimthegrim

1/15/2025 at 6:36:44 PM

NY dropped the ball in the 2010s with their Nanotechnology Initiative, because it became a jobs-for-votes scheme in upstate NY, and their key private sector flagships (IBM, AMD, Kodak) collapsed and divested out of the semiconductor industry (eg. IBM Micro + AMD becoming GloFlo, GloFlo and IBM in a decade long legal feud, Kodak's collapse, Apple leaving IBM for Intel and later TSMC).

That is not to say NY's semiconductor industry is dead - it's fairly active, but it's largely legacy nodes targeted at commodified usecases such as Automotive.

by alephnerd

1/15/2025 at 2:49:52 PM

Indeed, Apple* seem to be one of the only companies with the long term vision to integrate vertically and improve industry as a result. The short term pennies-on-the-dollar of outsourcing is just brain-dead and non-innovative.

*this is an observation from someone who has never bought a new apple product due to their increasingly closed eco-system

by dingdingdang

1/15/2025 at 4:10:41 PM

odd that you're not an Applehead but still think they're somehow "improving" the industry.

perhaps you mean "they provide competition among peers like Samsung and Sony, without which the industry would go slower, perhaps with worse products"?

ah, just noticed that you qualified "bought a new Apple..."

by markhahn

1/15/2025 at 4:17:02 PM

Are you proposing that the United States should operate factories without regard to margin?

by dcrazy

1/16/2025 at 12:14:38 AM

No. Sustaining a business with a margin doesn't necessarily mean that maximizing the margin has to be the ultimate goal. A company can look to maximize market share, revenue, or other ambitions.

by typ

1/15/2025 at 9:27:22 PM

Well... farming exists....

I'm not sure I agree microchips are as critical as stable food supply, but I'd be willing to entertain the idea they're close enough to be treated specially.

by grayhatter

1/16/2025 at 6:34:49 AM

Modern packaging - high density 2.5D/3D is defintely not a commodity.

Final packaging is.

by petra

1/15/2025 at 3:38:59 PM

It's interesting to me that this is in Phoenix. Does that mean good things for the city? I thought they were in a desert and running out of water, and not well positioned for climate change. On the other hand, maybe with more solar panels, electricity and manufacturing will be cheaper there in the future?

by losvedir

1/15/2025 at 5:07:41 PM

There's no problem with residential water use in Phoenix. There are still farms that could be shut down if water is needed.

The biggest problem seems to be parochial NIMBYs. People don't like that TSMC needed to bring in Taiwanese workers to staff up the plant. They are currently posting AI generated renderings of factories with billowing smoke stacks when talking about the proposed Amkor semiconductor packaging plant in Peoria.

by kevinpet

1/15/2025 at 9:39:26 PM

It’s also worth nothing that the TSMC plant is basically as far north as it’s possible to be while still counting as part of the (huge) Phoenix metro area. The vast majority of the 5 million residents of that metro area are nowhere near the plant and very unlikely to be affected by it in any way.

by umanwizard

1/16/2025 at 6:52:29 AM

As long as they don't have two microwaves in their household*

* humor

by unixhero

1/16/2025 at 7:01:44 PM

I don't get it...

by umanwizard

1/15/2025 at 7:00:52 PM

> There are still farms that could be shut down if water is needed.

Wow, that's good, glad you clarified that.

I was worried there weren't any farms that could be shut down if water is needed.

Can you imagine a world where we can't shut down farms to produce 4nm chips?

I am just so glad we can shut down farms to produce chips.

Farms are useless, but chips, we need it for the control grid. I am just glad we are all on the same page.

Who needs food when you have 4nm chips.

by therein

1/15/2025 at 7:48:29 PM

At least the fabs can recycle the majority of their water. Unlike farms which use more than is needed and are likely producing animal feed for international animals.

I get your point, but not all farms are created equal. Is it really so bad to shut down farms that grow feed for Arab race horses to produce computer chips?

by mywittyname

1/15/2025 at 7:53:59 PM

> I get your point, but not all farms are created equal. Is it really so bad to shut down farms that grow feed for Arab race horses to produce computer chips?

That, I agree. I noticed a sibling comment also mentioned that. If the farms in question are of that kind, it is reasonable. I'd just like to object to the creation of a general sense of sacrificing farms for fabs.

by therein

1/16/2025 at 4:03:17 AM

Having water artificially cheap for agricultural uses is a mistake.

If you're concerned about food security, subsidize actual food that could go to people in some way, but let water hit a real market price.

Else, we end up subsidizing water for clever export and other uses we don't really want, and we remove any incentive for efficiency in water use.

by mlyle

1/16/2025 at 7:03:10 PM

> I'd just like to object to the creation of a general sense of sacrificing farms for fabs.

"I was wrong, but I think my comment was still right based on vibes, so I wasn't wrong after all."

by umanwizard

1/15/2025 at 8:44:22 PM

Farms recycle the majority of their water as well. Just instead of it looping inside of a closed process it returns to the broader environment.

by timewizard

1/15/2025 at 9:26:21 PM

really stretching the definition of recycle there. Material staying within a closed loop is kind of a requirement for something to be recycled. The farms don't do anything to keep the water available and have to extract more water from other sources

by lovich

1/15/2025 at 10:10:10 PM

Water loss from evaporation and transpiration are inevitable, and run off is a large chunk of it. Nearly half of the water used in farming is lost, and some of that becomes run off that pollutes the environment and whatever bodies of water it reaches.

by heavyset_go

1/15/2025 at 8:04:59 PM

Arizona and California have outdated water management laws that basically mean that big agriculture gets free water.

Until recently Saudi Arabia was using these laws to grow alfalfa in the desert.

In California, water intensive crops like almond trees get free water.

https://youtu.be/XusyNT_k-1c

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/03/climate/arizona-saudi-ara...

by awongh

1/16/2025 at 9:49:21 AM

Yes, but... The way the law works is that the farms own that water. The state would likely have to use eminent domain and pay fair market value if they want to take it away. I have no idea what that would cost.

by amanaplanacanal

1/16/2025 at 10:08:26 AM

I mean, yes, use eminent domain to take the water… and then get TSMC to pay for it.

Maybe another big player in the system would even help build momentum to get these laws changed permanently…

by awongh

1/15/2025 at 7:23:51 PM

The US is a major food exporter with a supply around 125%. Shutting down a few farms in the desert seems worthwhile.

by alphager

1/15/2025 at 7:32:31 PM

Doing anything that uses a lot of water in a desert seems problematic to me. Water is only going to get scarcer in the west as climate change goes on.

by adamc

1/16/2025 at 5:46:13 AM

I think the reasoning here is to have the fabrication being done away from areas where a natural disaster might cause an issue. No earthquakes, no tornadoes, no hurricanes, no heavy winter storms with a ton of snow, etc. If you locate it on an elevated area with good drainage there won't be any problems with desert storms/flooding either.

by Root_Denied

1/15/2025 at 9:52:45 PM

> Water is only going to get scarcer in the west as climate change goes on.

Predictions are all over the place but the average prediction seems to say that at least half the US gets more water.

by Dylan16807

1/15/2025 at 10:26:15 PM

Not in the west, from what I've seen. The state I grew up in, Illinois, is definitely trending toward being more humid.

If you've seen otherwise and have references, I'm interested. I'm thinking about where to live next.

by adamc

1/15/2025 at 8:08:00 PM

This is an extremely over-simplified take. It depends on entirely on what the farms are producing, their water efficiency, etc. Nobody would seriously suggest that people go hungry so that we can have more chips, so responding as if that's the actual suggestion is unwarranted.

by csallen

1/15/2025 at 7:51:29 PM

A fair amount of that farm water is to grow alfalfa for the Saudi's dairy industry. So it's not all essential to US food security...

by pstuart

1/15/2025 at 7:51:26 PM

theres not exactly a lack of food in this country

by mtoner23

1/15/2025 at 8:26:24 PM

> Who needs food when you have 4nm chips.

Who needs logic and reason when you have false dichotomy?

by gosub100

1/16/2025 at 1:14:13 AM

We don't need farms in Phoenix. Farming in the middle of the desert where there's already limited water is pretty stupid.

by x3n0ph3n3

1/15/2025 at 7:21:33 PM

20 dollars? I wanted a peanut!

by zaik

1/15/2025 at 7:23:10 PM

Lots of the farms exist to provide year around salad. What is more important, year around salad or computer chips? Economically, for Arizona, the answer is pretty clear.

This is also why I laugh when people in wet areas talk crap about my state's water problem. My state's problem is your problem too buddy.

by bcrosby95

1/15/2025 at 7:43:15 PM

Also, eating raw salad veggies (lettuce in particular) is one of the best ways to get foodborne illnesses like E. Coli.

by QuercusMax

1/16/2025 at 9:11:54 AM

The place is a desert. Growing crops in a desert takes a lot of water, as you might imagine. A smarter thing to do is to not try to grow crops in a desert where it needs so much irrigation. The US has plenty of non-desert land for growing essential crops.

by shiroiushi

1/16/2025 at 11:59:01 AM

desert weather is consistent(ly warm sunny). Irrigation being the missing factor means that you can have a nice long growing season, undisrupted by bad weather, or storms or any other number of unpredictable factors.

by chii

1/15/2025 at 7:19:45 PM

Hello, sir? I think you need to go to the hospital, because it seems like you had a stroke or something else serious happen to you.

by Apes

1/15/2025 at 4:34:11 PM

Water in the fabs gets mostly recycled. There’s an old slidedeck from Intel’s Chandler (Phoenix metro area suburb) fab about it. This includes discharging what isn’t recycled to refill ground aquifer.

From what I understand, the area is more seismically stable, so the special building structures and equipment for more seismically active places are not needed.

There is the presence of ASU. The ASU president had been hired a while back to implement a very different kind of university system focused on broadening (not gate keeping) higher education and building up innovation. This includes both improving graduation rates in the traditional tracks and expanding non-traditional educational tracks. I don’t know if all those were considered by TSMC; they like hiring engineers straight out of college and training them in their methods.

by hosh

1/15/2025 at 4:05:29 PM

Phoenix the city is limited by its existing water rights but the geographical area isn't really that constrained; water rights are just held by private parties, particulaly farmers. ~70% of all water used in the state is used in agriculture. Industrial and residential consumers simply have to purchase those rights if they want to continue to expand in the area and chip making is a high value add industry.

by derektank

1/15/2025 at 4:10:41 PM

Is there any historical reason why farming is a big industry in a state associated with deserts? Did manufacturing never take root there until after WW2 when air conditioning became more affordable?

by azemetre

1/15/2025 at 4:39:26 PM

Before Phoenix the city was founded, there was a canal built by the indigenous people who live there in the lower Sonoran.

That canal became the basis for Phoenix, and eventually, the big canal that transport water long range through the state.

The other is that, with sufficient water, you can grow year round.

Not that I think industrial ag is good for society.

Phoenix itself is a metro area whose primary economic driver is real estate speculation. Many older citrus orchards has been surrounded, and sometimes bought and redeveloped.

by hosh

1/15/2025 at 4:38:24 PM

Farming isn't really that large of an industry in Arizona today, maybe 2% of GDP tops. But my understanding is that surface water rights were allocated over a hundred years ago and naturally those rights were allocated to the people that wanted them then, i.e. agricultural landowners.

by derektank

1/15/2025 at 5:16:12 PM

> Is there any historical reason why farming is a big industry in a state associated with deserts?

California is a desert too.

by johnvanommen

1/15/2025 at 4:22:56 PM

Farming isn't an industry. It's just how you have a civilization when population density is higher than a hunter-gatherer lifestyle can support. People have been farming in Arizona for several thousand years.

by kragen

1/15/2025 at 4:41:49 PM

I don’t know why this was down voted. This is historically true.

The modern canal that runs through Phoenix is built on top of ruins of a much older canal built by indigenous people for farming.

by hosh

1/15/2025 at 7:20:14 PM

Agriculture is an industry. Of course it is. It employs people, it makes use of technology, it is a distinct sector of the economy.

by chrisco255

1/15/2025 at 9:57:08 PM

Industry refers to a particular way of doing things that involves portable use of power. Instead of relying on natural cycles (wind-, water-driven machinery), it involves the use of engines (steam, gasoline, electrical) to drive tractors, pumps, produce industrial-scale fertilizers, etc. These engines can be constructed where there are lack of natural resources, or made portable, thus decoupling them from locations of natural resources. That decoupling is what allows industrialized systems, including industrial agriculture, to scale.

Agriculture is largely practiced with industrial methods now, but it's been around a lot longer before proto-industrial methods (water and wind mills). For example, Egypt, as a civilization, benefited from the natural flooding and silt of the Nile. It's been the bread basket for empires for several thousand years. They were not using industrial methods two or three thousand years ago.

There are also other forms of agriculture that is not easily recognized by the narrow lens we have today -- such as perennial food forests, hidden in the ruins of Amazonian jungles, or the Pacific Northwest, or the forest that used to cover the lands between the Appalachia and the Mississippi river. Those were not organized with the concept of employment, and it is distinctively low-tech.

by hosh

1/17/2025 at 12:22:04 PM

Yes I would generally agree that once agricultural moves from merely being an exercise in survival to being a marketable activity, it becomes an industry. In that sense, agriculture has been an industry in western civilization for quite a few centuries.

by chrisco255

1/15/2025 at 11:02:30 PM

Thank you so much for writing the comment I didn't have the patience to write.

by kragen

1/15/2025 at 5:52:55 PM

>Farming isn't an industry.

It both is and isn't. Have you seen PETA footage from inside factory farms? It's hellish in that special way only the industrial revolution could produce.

by stackghost

1/15/2025 at 6:48:33 PM

We're talking about irrigated fields here, not factory farms, which are certainly nightmarish but don't use a major percentage of Arizona's water.

by kragen

1/15/2025 at 4:37:15 PM

I am sure that some people will question some of the historiography there, but Cadillac Desert is a book all about the history of water management of the great plains, from Kansas onwards.

TLDR: America has spent a whole lot of money trying to make land more productive for farming, including land where it probably doesn't make much economic sense once you account for the infrastructure costs.

by hibikir

1/15/2025 at 6:03:15 PM

Thanks for the rec, another comment mentioned water rights and that never came to my mind.

by azemetre

1/15/2025 at 7:50:54 PM

I guess the Mexican border has something to do with it?

by ahoka

1/15/2025 at 5:17:54 PM

Both are true.

Looks like the fab requires about 40,000 acre-ft/yr of water. If they really do start running out of water, adding desal of AZ's brackish aquifers would cost the fab about $20m/year. Not really worth it for farming, but completely fine for a fab.

by chris_va

1/15/2025 at 5:48:25 PM

>40,000 acre-ft/yr of water

... is "acre feet" a common measurement of volume in the USA?

by stackghost

1/15/2025 at 6:38:08 PM

Yes, It's from farming. To state the obvious, it's the volume of water you'd have if a foot of rain fell on an acre of field.

So, it's the unit that gets used when discussing irrigation. Or water usage that competes with irrigation. :P

by schaefer

1/15/2025 at 7:22:54 PM

Makes sense, since we usually measure rainfall in inches, it's pretty easy to look up weather records for an area to see what the minimum annual rainfall is expected to be.

by chrisco255

1/15/2025 at 5:53:03 PM

It is specifically for reservoirs and by extension municipal water supply systems because it's relatively easy to determine the surface area and height of a reservoir

by ranger207

1/15/2025 at 5:52:08 PM

We'll use anything but metric lol. It's about 1,233 cubic meters of water.

by connicpu

1/16/2025 at 1:05:26 AM

The comparable unit (in terms of estimating irrigation needs vs rainfall vs reservoir draw, which are the terms we reason with in this part of the US) would be the hectare-meter, which is 10,000 cubic meters.

by syncsynchalt

1/15/2025 at 7:29:29 PM

Which is incidentally only 1% off from half an olympic-size swimming pool.

In other words, the fab requires about 20,000 swimming pools of water every year... or equivalently, 1 swimming pool every 27 minutes.

by kkg_scorpio

1/15/2025 at 5:54:46 PM

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acre-foot

> The acre-foot is a non-SI unit of volume equal to about 1,233 m3 commonly used in the United States in reference to large-scale water resources, such as reservoirs, aqueducts, canals, sewer flow capacity, irrigation water,[1] and river flows.

Seems to be.

by rad_gruchalski

1/15/2025 at 6:09:16 PM

It's a surprisingly convenient unit of measurement. Rainfall and irrigation typically are 0-1m per year, so if you have a 10acre farm you need 10acre-m of water to grow... Though, can't mix units, that would be silly :).

by chris_va

1/16/2025 at 1:02:33 AM

Specifically in the desert west, yes.

We measure our land in acres and water is the limiting resource for using it. Water requirements for crops are expressed in feet/year (or inches/day). Combine the two and you get acre-feet.

m^3 would be a less useful unit in terms of calculating water needs out here, the metric equivalent would be hectare-meters (10,000 m^3).

by syncsynchalt

1/15/2025 at 6:26:02 PM

Yeah, not uncommon at all in most scenarios where water volume is large enough.

by Glyptodon

1/15/2025 at 4:02:16 PM

I live here and we are definitely looking toward impending water shortages, and no one care at all. Nestle is in the process of building a 200 acre coffee creamer factory. The major flower delivery services grow their flowers here. We have tons of cotton and alfalfa fields. There are 100s of golf courses and in the wealthier areas everyone has a lush green lawn.

by imzadi

1/15/2025 at 4:06:58 PM

Sounds like a resource that isn't appropriately priced

by 0_____0

1/15/2025 at 11:40:36 PM

They sold land rights to the Saudis who then siphoned off the water (now revoked said rights).

"[The Saudis] used sprinklers to grow alfalfa in La Paz County and exports it to feed dairy cattle in Saudi Arabia. The company did not pay for the water it used under the old agreement."

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/saudi-arabia-water-access-arizo...

by leptons

1/16/2025 at 1:14:37 AM

Water rights in the western US are mercenary. There's a healthy market in prior appropriation rights.

Just because people don't like what the water is used for doesn't mean the water isn't priced appropriately. You'll still get farmers growing thirsty / pricey crops in the desert if it covers the cost of irrigation.

by syncsynchalt

1/16/2025 at 2:56:30 AM

We pay about $130/mo for water in north phoenix even if we don't use a drop.

by paustint

1/16/2025 at 11:39:12 PM

That's nuts. Is that just the customer fee?

by 0_____0

1/15/2025 at 4:12:01 PM

priced -> rationed

by amelius

1/15/2025 at 4:32:08 PM

in capitalism, prices are literally how rationing happens. the theory is that it distributes the resources to those who can make them most productive. here, theoretically the water will be used more productively by chipmakers than by farmers, so the chipmakers will be able to out-bid the farmers and the water will be allocated to them. this is the "invisible hand" of the free market.

by mrsilencedogood

1/15/2025 at 5:07:37 PM

Also worth pointing out that residential water uses like bathing/washing water and especially drinking water will easily outbid alfalfa farmers.

by loeg

1/15/2025 at 5:52:25 PM

No, rationing is the complete opposite and ensures that not just rich people can have access to a resource.

This is basically why the word "rationing" exists in the first place.

What good is being "productive" (whatever your definition of it) if poor people die from lack of access to water because chips need to exist.

by amelius

1/15/2025 at 7:19:30 PM

We aren't talking about drinking-water quantities of water here but about irrigation quantities. Poor people in Arizona are not in danger of dying from thirst. Think Milagro Beanfield War, not Dune. Poor people in Phoenix get their water from the water utility, which gives you 3740+ gallons of potable water per month for US$4.64: https://www.phoenix.gov/waterservicessite/Documents/Rates_Ef...

That works out to 0.032¢ per liter. A quarter (25¢) will buy you 760 liters of water, enough to survive for three months. That's about 1000× lower than a price at which even Phoenix's homeless might start dying of thirst due to the cost of water. (Homeless people don't pay the water utility, but they get water from people who do.)

Poor people in the country get their water from wells, which cost money to drill but basically nothing to pump more water from.

Rationing might be a reasonable thing to do to keep the aquifer from being depleted, but it would be likely to hit poor people much harder than rich people, because poor people don't have the political influence to prevent the enactment of regulations that would hurt them badly, such as a requirement for an environmental review before drilling a new drinking-water well.

Rationing could cause poor people to die from lack of access to water. Markets won't, unless you're talking about something like a Mars colony.

by kragen

1/15/2025 at 9:27:20 PM

Well if you put it like that then I'm starting to wonder what shortage we are talking about in the first place.

by amelius

1/15/2025 at 10:04:19 PM

A bunch of entities have perpetual promises for specific amounts of water, and sometimes the promises are too big and can't be fulfilled, or a city needs some water and can't get it allocated, or stuff like that. So, shortages.

Add in some market mechanics and that problem disappears. The only entities left without water are the ones unwilling to pay a small fraction of a cent.

by Dylan16807

1/16/2025 at 10:48:25 AM

If you're trying to water a cornfield big enough to feed your family, a fraction of a cent per liter might still be too much, though (and again we would predict that rationing measures would favor politically powerful agribusinesses and perhaps the Indian reservations over most small farmers). But it's not about dying of thirst.

by kragen

1/16/2025 at 5:39:47 PM

A fifth of an acre of higher-water corn will provide more than 10k calories per day for a year. So about 5 acre inches, about half a million liters, if the price spikes up to 0.1 cents per liter that's $500 of water.

I'm not particularly concerned with the viability of people farming their own food but that seems plenty cheap.

Even desalinated water would be under a thousand dollars, and we could 10x the water supply at that point.

> and again we would predict that rationing measures would favor politically powerful agribusinesses and perhaps the Indian reservations over most small farmers

If the system allocates free water which can then be easily resold, the end result is basically the same as everyone paying but some entities get free money. Anyone expecting to buy their water should be no worse off.

by Dylan16807

1/15/2025 at 7:04:59 PM

What’s the point of rationing water to monoculture alfalfa fields? Looks like chips factory in that area makes much more sense.

by mantas

1/15/2025 at 6:12:12 PM

[flagged]

by guywithahat

1/15/2025 at 10:04:46 AM

I wished we used the node names, like TSMC N4/N4P/N4X, because nanometers are meaningless.

by Aissen

1/15/2025 at 2:30:46 PM

Well in that context TSMC N4P tells you no more information than 4-nm does.

by vonneumannstan

1/15/2025 at 5:55:09 PM

No information, but at least it doesn't mislead into thinking there are 4nm transistors, or transistor gates, or some discrete feature of any sort that's that small.

by nsxwolf

1/15/2025 at 10:42:28 AM

Are transistors per square mm a better metric ?

by arnaudsm

1/15/2025 at 11:59:06 AM

I won’t be surprised if the US plants started referring to the 4NM nodes in their imperial form (1.575 × 10-7”)

by greggsy

1/15/2025 at 3:11:50 PM

Angstroms aren’t imperial, but they are non-SI, so if we want to be petty they’d probably be the way to go.

by bee_rider

1/15/2025 at 1:32:12 PM

Scientific notation would be to logical. Instead they'll make a new tiny unit that subdivides the inch into 1/81975489347.7 of an inch.

by _Algernon_

1/15/2025 at 10:17:54 PM

God yes.

by Dylan16807

1/15/2025 at 11:57:53 AM

[flagged]

by robertlagrant

1/15/2025 at 2:48:29 PM

Americans need to stop measuring things in feet :)

by koakuma-chan

1/15/2025 at 11:59:43 AM

Per square banana please. This is the internet.

by huijzer

1/15/2025 at 1:51:43 PM

I thought libraries of congress were the correct way to measure?

by sumtechguy

1/15/2025 at 1:57:08 PM

1.31 x 10⁻⁸ football fields.

(1 football field = 91.44 meters)

by rvnx

1/15/2025 at 6:13:10 PM

> (1 football field = 91.44 meters)

By? Which football? The real football, or the football played mostly with hands?

by rad_gruchalski

1/16/2025 at 1:48:00 AM

= 100m if you're using metric football fields

by plaguuuuuu

1/15/2025 at 4:03:25 PM

Bruh, you're never gonna be a good trad wife as a man. You're just not that pretty.

by PittleyDunkin

1/15/2025 at 10:30:27 AM

As such I’m going to assume it’s the least impressive variant of 4NM.

by stingraycharles

1/15/2025 at 8:55:13 AM

Can't wait to see the factory in Germany also starting to pump out chips.

by dotdi

1/15/2025 at 8:56:11 AM

German TSMC fab will produce 16nm there, not 4nm though. Useful for the auto industry but much lower margin and less strategically important than 4nm fab in the US.

by Cumpiler69

1/15/2025 at 10:21:32 AM

Strategic for that same German auto industry, though. I assume that the Covid disruption to the supply of boring but essential microcontrollers for cars was a wake-up call.

Speaking of the leading edge, though: while industrial policy, like other kinds of investment, is easier with the benefit of hindsight, there must be some regret at having let Global Foundries drop out of the peloton.

by leoc

1/15/2025 at 9:05:49 AM

That's still nice, especially considering that it’s somewhere between Haswell and Broadwell from 2014.

Maybe not the kind of progress or initiative that gets headlines, but neither is it trying to push as far as what Intel has been trying to do for the past few years.

by KronisLV

1/15/2025 at 10:08:04 AM

Sure, but coming dead last behind Taiwan, Korea, US, Japan and China in the race to cutting edge semiconductor manufacturing is nothing to brag about. That's like celebrating for coming last.

This means you're getting the lowest industry margins, meaning less profits, less money for R&D, less wages and also less geopolitical leverage. This is nothing to celebrate but should be an alarm clock for our elected leader to wake the f up.

A lot of semi research is done in the EU, like at IMEC in Belgium, but few of it ends up commercialized by EU companies, so EU taxpayer money gets spent but other nations get to reap the rewards.

by Cumpiler69

1/15/2025 at 12:02:11 PM

> nothing to brag about

Maybe some things shouldn't be about bragging but about getting the job done, and cutting edge isn't the only way to do it. If anything, the problem here isn't that it's "just" 16nm but that the EU isn't developing a end-to-end (research to manufacturing) true home grown industry and still relies a lot on external partners like Intel to do it from the outside.

But a good first step to develop enough talent locally that can later flow into domestic alternatives.

by buran77

1/15/2025 at 2:55:40 PM

Agree with this take. Additionally it brings geopolitical stability by not putting the onus on just one-to-two countries (Taiwan, US) to produce the majority of the worlds info-tech infrastructure. A 16nm process is still very very modern in the grander scope of things.

Be interesting to see if there's integration with research environments within the EU.. otherwise it could fizzle in terms of it's true potential positive impact.

by dingdingdang

1/15/2025 at 10:58:44 AM

I don't think they want cutting edge tech, they want to be able to not have to stop their entire industry during the next pandemic/war/whatever just because they can't get their hands on a $2 chip made on the other side of the world

by lm28469

1/15/2025 at 12:57:21 PM

It's all well and good shooting for the best, latest semiconductors. It's also well and good securing the source of the rest of the chips used by the rest of the devices in the world. Cars, consumer goods, every industrial machine ever, etc ... A stable domestic supply chain might pay dividends, especially if international order degrades at all.

by jvanderbot

1/15/2025 at 11:59:03 AM

> but few of it ends up commercialized by EU companies

ASML is massive, no?

by robertlagrant

1/15/2025 at 10:12:06 AM

Small steps, hopefully they move up from there.

by bwb

1/15/2025 at 11:53:52 AM

Well big part of the EUV tech used stems from Europe.

by looofooo0

1/15/2025 at 1:32:43 PM

False. EUV tech is 100% researched and manufactured in the US.

Edit to answer @ looofooo0: EUV tech comes from Sandia Labs research that ASML licensed, and the EUV light sources (there's no such thing as an EUV laser, the Trmpf is a regular laser firing into tin droplets for EUV generation) are made by Cymer in the US which ASML integrates them into their stepper which is a relative commodity item in comparison to the light-source.

by Cumpiler69

1/15/2025 at 2:52:37 PM

Europe takes credit for ASML we can't do it without them the lions share of the work it takes to make the machines is due to ASML, it would be nice if they had big tech companies of their own. They decline of Europe is already happening the wealthy aren't as greedy there at least not greedy enough to work as hard as the American thus eventually US interests will control Europe.

by mainecoder

1/15/2025 at 2:10:31 PM

?? ASML builds the EUV machines in Europe. Zeiss builds the optical compentents in Europe. Trumpf builds ne EUV-Laser in Europe.

Moreover, most of the tech stems from the European-funded EUCLIDES (Extreme UV Concept Lithography Development System) project.

by looofooo0

1/15/2025 at 9:42:24 PM

You’re forgetting about 2 decades of US DoE funding of EUV research through EUV-LLC which ASML joined late. A lot of the early groundwork and foundational research was done by DoE including using US built synchrotron accelerators to try out various early approaches.

by cromwellian

1/17/2025 at 8:15:24 AM

Yes, I think the route was Soviet Union, Japan, USA, Europe.

by looofooo0

1/15/2025 at 3:22:29 PM

Have you seen the salaries at IMEC?

by selimthegrim

1/15/2025 at 2:59:35 PM

What Europe wants is not necessarily profitability but rather resilience. You can't leave this kind of decision up to the irrationality of market forces. So—you're correct, germany (or the EU) should subsidize chips if they want to weather the future.

by PittleyDunkin

1/15/2025 at 11:01:01 AM

If you mean the Intel factory, this is delayed by 2 years. If it ever will come.. And the other planed Wolfspeed factory is cancelled completely.

by Aldipower

1/15/2025 at 12:12:14 PM

Both will never come. For obvious reasons.

by ulfw

1/15/2025 at 12:21:14 PM

What are the obvious reasons?

by rajamaka

1/15/2025 at 12:27:16 PM

I guess the expensive energy in Germany, lots of red tape and nimbyism, and not enough state subsidies which is what these companies were hoping for when they were fishing for places to open fabs.

by Cumpiler69

1/15/2025 at 2:58:36 PM

There's also the fact that every single fab opened outside of Taiwan reduces Taiwan's national security.

by PittleyDunkin

1/15/2025 at 3:26:13 PM

Is Taiwan's national security the major concern here? I assumed everyone was just bluffing at that until they can get their own supply.

Getting dragging in to an East China unification war because you can't squeeze lighting in to rocks on time is a tragedy.

by swarnie

1/15/2025 at 3:49:16 PM

> East China unification war

Are you from China? I find this phraseology very odd

by whimsicalism

1/15/2025 at 4:29:10 PM

Who cares? the situation is the same regardless: china wants taiwan, taiwan doesn't want to be a part of china, and the single largest factor blocking china from taking taiwan is TSMC. Not the american navy, not sanctions, not anything else. If TSMC weren't a factor they could simply destroy the island and move in.

by PittleyDunkin

1/15/2025 at 4:40:59 PM

I care because I am interested in how language reflects and shapes beliefs and I have never seen that phrase before.

by whimsicalism

1/15/2025 at 9:54:08 PM

This is too simplistic.

The ROC has not had any formal military alliance with the United States since 1979. TSMC was not founded until 1987, didn't start producing chips until 1993. It was not even publicly traded until 1994 (and that was only on the Taiwanese stock exchange; it was listed on the NYSE in 1997).

The reason the PRC hasn't done it is because it would make no sense politically or economically. They have a lot more to lose and a lot less to gain than Russia did in 2014 (Sevastopol was/is seen as integral to the Russian navy...there is no parallel with Taiwan as the PRC has plenty of excellent ports on the mainland).

And the continued existence of Taiwan gives the PRC a convenient excuse to sabre-rattle.

by mjh2539

1/16/2025 at 1:51:32 AM

No formal alliance, but in reality, if you look up the proportion of Taiwanese-made chips used by the US military in... everything - aircraft, missiles ,tanks, planes, everything - invading Taiwan would probably cripple the US military's production capabilities so it's probably kicking off a proper war with USA.

by plaguuuuuu

1/16/2025 at 4:53:46 AM

It would be a headache but it wouldn't be the end of the world. At the end of the day there are other fabrication plants to manufacture microprocessors. And it's not as if China invading Taiwan would suddenly make all of the existing supply stop working.

by mjh2539

1/15/2025 at 4:49:06 PM

> Are you from China?

No? I'm from the UK if it matters but i have no particular allegiance to east, west or chip manufacturing facilities.

East China / West Taiwan is for lack of a better word, a meme. Unification war i guess i dredged up from 40k

Either way my point stands. Every country that has supported Tiawan is scrambling to get chips online domestically because they don't need to get involved in the start of WW3. To claim otherwise is just disingenuous.

by swarnie

1/15/2025 at 4:13:53 PM

No, the world outside PRC don't believe Taiwan should be "unified" against its will. The fact that Tiawanese industry is quite important is more of a gain factor, not polarity.

by markhahn

1/15/2025 at 4:51:02 PM

Do they believe enough to go fight a war over it?

If we assume everyone can make their own hardware at home.

by swarnie

1/15/2025 at 8:40:48 PM

Taiwan forms the first Island chain that currently keeps China's navy constrained.

Loosing Taiwan is tantamount to accepting Chinese military hegemony in SEA and East Asia. No need to export ideology, it's more like if I put up tariffs against Chinese goods to protect domestic business and then a few PLAN warships park up right next to my trade corridors.

by corimaith

1/15/2025 at 6:17:07 PM

As long as TSMC is the major chip hub.

by rad_gruchalski

1/15/2025 at 6:15:37 PM

> Is Taiwan's national security the major concern here?

Yes. It’s called “semiconductor shield”. As long as China cannot manufacture chips like those made in Taiwan, it will thread carefully.

by rad_gruchalski

1/15/2025 at 12:41:07 PM

Well, your guess is off the mark.

by kuschkufan

1/15/2025 at 1:29:56 PM

Care to explain why?

by Cumpiler69

1/15/2025 at 10:04:09 AM

How much does Germany's very expensive electricity affect TSMC's costs?

by UltraSane

1/15/2025 at 11:35:03 AM

At that size of node, semiconductor manufacturing costs are not material constrained.

by varjag

1/15/2025 at 2:07:06 PM

electricity is not "material" it is energy input.

by UltraSane

1/15/2025 at 2:50:08 PM

I’m assuming he means capex vs opex ? Electricity is opex.

by nothrabannosir

1/17/2025 at 8:31:41 AM

When you get a detailed quotation from a manufacturer it's usually split into three: NRE, time (labor and machine) and material. Energy and other recurring consumables go under material.

In case of semiconductors with frontier processes (last few generations) NRE is extremely high and machine time rates are expensive. Doubling or tripling energy costs would have negligible effects.

by varjag

1/15/2025 at 4:17:39 PM

chip fabs are big and contain a lot of things like pumps (and even a few very exotic lasers). but they're not power-intensive the way a steel plant is - or even a datacenter.

by markhahn

1/15/2025 at 11:51:01 AM

[dead]

by Reimersholme

1/15/2025 at 9:16:58 AM

I wished they produced the chips in Europe instead of United States.

by wdb

1/15/2025 at 12:24:52 PM

IIRC, this isn't happening because Europe doesn't have a large enough industry to purchase chips at the scale required to have such a huge investment.

This one in USA is for political reasons and likely will be feasible only if US manages to preserve the global political order.

Maybe Europe could have had force having a latest node FAB by banning exports of EUV machines and have factories built in Europe through flying Taiwanese engineers to build and operate it and call it huge success like USA is doing now.

I don't know if its worth the cost though. Sure it is good to have it bu in USA's case they even haven't built the industry around it, they will produce the chips in USA, call it "Made in America", collect the political points and ship the chips to the other side of the planet for further processing.

Is it really that big of a deal to have European machines being operated by the Taiwanese in the USA to print chips that need a visit to China to become useful? If the global world order collapses, will the 330M Americans be able to sustain the FAB? If it doesn't collapse, will that be still a good investment considering that Taiwanese have the good stuff for themselves and integrated into the full chain without flying parts across the world?

by mrtksn

1/15/2025 at 10:24:34 PM

Well they made the fiirst step. They have the fab, other parts of industry may emerge with time

by earnestinger

1/15/2025 at 10:04:50 AM

Europe really dropped the ball on semiconductor manufacturing.

by UltraSane

1/15/2025 at 1:16:58 PM

That narrative doesn't make sense, making Taiwanese build and run a factory in USA is not much different than an oil rich Arab country luring a western institution opening a campus in their desert. Its good to have but it doesn't make you a superconductor superpower.

To be fair, the USA does have many of the key companies and technologies that make these ICs possible in first place so it's not exactly like that but in the case of TSMC it kind of is.

by mrtksn

1/15/2025 at 1:32:27 PM

Top 5 Countries That Produce the Most Semiconductors:

    1 Taiwan
    2 South Korea
    3 Japan
    4 United States
    5 China
According to https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/semicondu... the US has 95 fabs as of 2024 and 12% of Advanced Processes Market Share. The US had 37% in the 1990

Germany has 22

France has 5

Spain has 1

UK has 16

Ireland has 3

Italy has 2

Sweden has 1

Finland has 1

by UltraSane

1/15/2025 at 8:45:37 PM

It's simpler than that. The USA holds the majority of the IP.

by timewizard

1/15/2025 at 12:13:51 PM

Says the US who can't manufacture anything modern unless they urge a Taiwanese manufacturer using European lithography machines to make chips. Let's please not do this senseless patriotism that so en vogue in the US right now.

by ulfw

1/15/2025 at 1:34:57 PM

The United States possessed approximately 12% of the world's global chip manufacturing capacity as of 2021. This is a notably lower percentage of global capacity than the US enjoyed just a few decades previously (37% in 1990, for instance), before countries such as Taiwan and China ramped up their semiconductor production capabilities. Despite this decline, the semiconductor industry remains quite lucrative in the US. According to the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA), semiconductors exports added $62 billion (USD) to the US economy in 2021, more than any product other than refined oil, aircraft, crude oil, and natural gas. Many of these imported chips return to the US in the form of finished consumer electronics.

Although the US held just 12% of the world's total semiconductor manufacturing capacity in 2021, US-based companies held approximately 46.3 percent of the total semiconductor market share. This seeming discrepancy can be explained by both the dollar value of imported US semiconductors, outlined above, and the fact that many US-based companies own and operate semiconductor fabrication plants in other countries, such as Japan. In such cases, the manufacturing capacity is added to that country's capacity rather than the capacity of the US, but the profits typically count as part of the US economy.

by UltraSane

1/15/2025 at 12:55:19 PM

[flagged]

by JKCalhoun

1/15/2025 at 11:14:51 AM

They are the critical only manufacturer/supplier of EUV machines.

by cma

1/15/2025 at 3:33:31 PM

Would not have been competitive due to labor costs. Also the chemicals used in manufacturing are quite toxic.

by whatevaa

1/15/2025 at 4:18:34 PM

do you really think fabs are labor-intensive, or that they discharge toxic waste?

by markhahn

1/15/2025 at 2:57:12 PM

What a ridiculous thing to say about the home of ASML.

by PittleyDunkin

1/15/2025 at 10:22:30 AM

[dead]

by gswdh

1/15/2025 at 10:00:27 AM

We should have our own sovereign comparable technology companies in Europe by now.

Fail.

Sold the fundamental industries out to Philips who sold it to the Chinese.

by gazchop

1/15/2025 at 9:24:41 AM

They do in Dresden Germany, but not nearly as cutting edge as the ones in US and Taiwan. US is a more useful strategic ally for Taiwan than EU. Not to mention the more expensive energy in Germany vs the US.

EU finds out the hard way that not having had energy independence plus a weak/non-existent military relying mostly on the US, has costly second order externalities that voters never think about or factor in their decisions(I'm European).

The best way to have peace is to always be ready for war. Being a non-armed hippie pacifist nation sounds good in some utopic fantasy world like the Smurfs, but in reality it only invites aggression from powerful despots like Putin and Xi and even your strong ally, the US, can exploit your moment of weakness and security dependence on it, to push its own agenda and trade terms on you.

After all, whenever EU falters, America gains: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jE-E1lQunm0

by Cumpiler69

1/15/2025 at 9:48:33 AM

That's true, but there is a large financial cost to always being ready for war. The US has spent 80 years being the "policeman of the world" for good or bad. Lots of bad decisions but the world also takes for granted the open seas, etc. that come at a great cost to Americans in reduced social services like health insurance and higher education.

by jraby3

1/15/2025 at 9:55:59 AM

Firstly, you don't need to spend America levels (more than than the next world powers combined) to have an efective military deterrent, since currently most EU member states barely spend 2% GDP on defense which is too little. You can have a strong military AND welfare services if you're smart about your state finances which many EU members are not(looking at you Germany), especially since defense investments create more jobs and innovations flowing back into the state coffers. Switzerland is a good example.

Secondly, America's defense is way more expensive than it needs to be due to a lot of high level corruption and lobbying from the military industrial complex profiteering when it comes to purchasing decisions, where a 10$ bag of bolts is bought by the military for 50K$, shovelings taxpayer money into the right private industry pockets. EU can achieve similar results with way less cost if it wanted to by minimizing this style of corruption but that's easier said than done. The only one rivaling America's military inefficiency is Germany who spends more than France, a nuclear power with aircraft carriers, but can't afford to issue underwear and dog tags to new conscripts.

Thirdly, America's lack of social services is not due to its powerful military, but due to political choices and inefficiencies. It could easily have better welfare if it wanted to since it can afford it with the world's largest GDP, but it chooses not to, since the current status quo is enriching a lot of private enterprises and parasites, while the concept of even more welfare is usually not a popular topic with the US voters which see welfare recipients as lazy and an unnecessary money sink funded by higher taxes on the middle class which they don't want. So their issue is social and political, not economical.

by Cumpiler69

1/15/2025 at 12:13:14 PM

> Firstly, you don't need to spend America levels (more than than the next world powers combined) to have an efective military deterrent,

Would you consider most European countries to actually have an effective military deterrent?

By troop count, munitions stock, or the number if tanks and jets I don't see anyone as having a particularly impressive military in Europe. That doesn't mean they couldn't organize one if needed, but that's a different issue.

> Thirdly, America's lack of social services is not due to its powerful military, but due to political choices and inefficiencies.

You're missing a big factor here, cultural differences. America was built on the idea of people making a way for themselves and living or dying by their own successes or failures. We've moved pretty far away from that and do now have social programs and safety nets, smaller than many European countries' nets, but the expectation of making a way for yourself is still under the surface. Many people simply don't want the level of welfare programs seen in other countries.

by _heimdall

1/15/2025 at 12:43:22 PM

> By troop count, munitions stock, or the number if tanks and jets I don't see anyone as having a particularly impressive military in Europe.

compared to what? Who does Europe need to fight who has more ammo, tanks, jets and nukes? Russia has proven itself unable to take on Ukraine with half-assed support by the west, China and India are far away.

Shall Europe prepare to fight the US for Greenland?

by riffraff

1/15/2025 at 12:54:39 PM

Russia has an estimated 1.5 million troops and plenty of equipment. They have seemed to still be very lacking in military logistics, which is crucial, but they also haven't seemed to be throwing everything they have at Ukraine.

I'd strongly recommend you not underestimate Russian ability by assuming Ukraine is the best they could do. That doesn't mean they are going to invade further into Europe, but we're talking about military size and deterrence here.

by _heimdall

1/16/2025 at 6:12:16 AM

I'm sure Russia can do more, e.g. they have not enacted martial law and forced conscription. What I'm saying is that the current level of deterrent seems enough given what we now know about Russia's military might.

NATO-without-USA has more aircraft, tanks, and watercrafts than Russia. Less stored ammo for sure, and probably not as effective, but on the other hand: nukes.

by riffraff

1/15/2025 at 2:39:29 PM

that was a somewhat defensible if somewhat silly position back in 2022, but in 2025 with part of Russia occupied by Ukraine, the Soviet stockpiles emptied, and North Koreans being brought in to fill the gaps, what the hell are you talking about?

by adgjlsfhk1

1/15/2025 at 5:08:18 PM

I actually expected them to do better (militarily, obviously worse for Ukraine) in the first few days of the war. They showed the Russian military hadn't learned much from their previous logistics issues, but resources wasn't the problem.

Sounds like we just have different expectations of how stretched the Russians are today, nothing wrong with especially as I'm assuming neither of us have access to the most meaningful field assessment reports.

My view on how the Russians have handled the war, since losing their chance at a quick sweep, has been that they are doing only enough to keep pressure and roughly maintain the front line gains they made. Sure that line has moved, and Ukraine did a pretty impressive job capturing some Russian territory which I don't think was expected by many, but the Russians seem to be balancing a lot more than just a single goal of victory.

I'm curious where you are getting reliable Intel on the Russians current stockpile of munitions, I haven't come across anything meaningful there publicly beyond potentially politically motivated statements and reporting regurgitating those same claims.

Edit: its worth noting there are other reason the North Koreans may have sent troops. If the country is feels the military needs actual combat experience for whatever reason, for example, they could send troops regardless of whether it actually helps the Russian effort.

by _heimdall

1/16/2025 at 3:46:51 AM

For a detailed description of Russian losses to date, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzR8BacYS6U. (with data mostly from https://www.youtube.com/@CovertCabal/videos which go into the satellite pictures which are pretty hard to dispute.) The TLDR is Russia to date has lost

almost all their functional BMDs

~4/5ths of their functional BMPs

almost all of their MTLBs and MTLbus

~2/3rds of their big artillery

~1/3rd of their small artillery (because they are short on ammo)

all of their mortars

~4/5ths of their towed artillery (that isn't from WW2)

~9/10ths of their rocket artillery

Furthermore, these numbers have been cross correlated with visually confirmed loss data https://www.oryxspioenkop.com/2022/02/attack-on-europe-docum..., .

by adgjlsfhk1

1/15/2025 at 3:06:52 PM

People don't want to be taken care of if they're sick or injured? They'd rather be backfired or dead because of an accident? Unless if they participate in the American employment cabal?

Please. People want to be taken care of. America was built by people escaping famine and people escaping poor living/working conditions.

In other words, it was built by people trying to make a better living for themselves. Living or dying by your success or failure wasn't a desirable feature, it was an incidental side effect of colonizing a new land.

by jpalawaga

1/16/2025 at 1:09:48 AM

You're cherry picking only the benefits of welfare programs and ignoring downsides.

Ask a person if they would prefer to be taken care of when sick and of course the answer would be yes. It isn't that simple.

Welfare programs require taxes to fund them and larger government bureaucracy to manage them. Not everyone agrees with that, and not every government is actually trustworthy to manage the programs well.

by _heimdall

1/15/2025 at 10:25:10 AM

But being the "policeman of the world" has helped with preserving dollar's status as the major currency for international transactions between third countries, and in particular for oil, which in turn makes the dollar a desirable currency, because everyone has and wants to have dollars, and has allowed the federal central bank to print the trillions of dollars it had been printing over and over without it losing its value. Any other country's currency would have been super-inflated if they did the same.

by freehorse

1/15/2025 at 11:02:31 AM

> but there is a large financial cost to always being ready for war. The US has spent 80 years being the "policeman of the world" for good or bad.

The US has never gone through the stage of being "ready for war" and instead went for the "living from one war to the next"

by ekianjo

1/15/2025 at 12:06:44 PM

> takes for granted the open seas

The open seas is a myth. It is the American seas unless you have a lot of nuclear weapons.

> that come at a great cost to Americans in reduced social services like health insurance and higher education

But also brought lots of business and investment too. On total it's positive, otherwise the US would not do it. *I am not saying the distribution of the incoming wealth was equal.

by csomar

1/15/2025 at 4:21:50 PM

are you claiming that the US disadvantages non-American traffic? like Chinese vessels are less safe, or not free to travel, or prone to piracy?

I think that's not the case. you can make a case that Russia's "shadow fleet" is being treated with some bias, but then again...

by markhahn

1/15/2025 at 10:39:32 AM

> Lots of bad decisions but the world also takes for granted the open seas, etc. that come at a great cost to Americans in reduced social services like health insurance and higher education.

Thanks for the laugh

by shafyy

1/15/2025 at 10:57:39 AM

The reason the US defence budget is so sky-fucking-high is because we effectively pay for everyone's military, though.

I doubt the other budget line items would see an increase with defence cuts, but we certainly don't need the entire defence budget for just our own sake. America doesn't need 11 nuclear aircraft carriers or nearly 2500 F-35s, among other excesses.

Also: Attitudes like yours sincerely make me want to see America First pushed more literally to the point of leaving those who don't appreciate us to fend for themselves. Japan, EU, and so on.

Obama already declared we aren't the world police anymore, for better or worse.

by Dalewyn

1/15/2025 at 11:15:32 AM

Any talk that assumes the US defense budget is massive is silly. It's approx 12% of the federal budget and 3.4% of the nation's GDP. It seems large because the US is rich and it seems large compare to the EU because most of the EU, besides Poland, decided it was a lot cheaper to have a token force and leave the real work to the Americans.

by 3688346844

1/15/2025 at 12:04:59 PM

Size of the budget is all in the eye of the beholder though. I don't think its unreasonable for someone to see 12% of the total budget going to defense as massive, especially when the country isn't actively at war.

by _heimdall

1/15/2025 at 11:29:59 AM

Using the left-hand list here as a reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_highest...

It takes all nine of the top 10 countries besides America (#1) to finally match and exceed the American defence budget. Of those nine, only two (Germany and France) are EU members.

In a word, the American defence budget is fucking massive and we certainly don't need anywhere even remotely most of it for ourselves.

by Dalewyn

1/15/2025 at 12:25:56 PM

You’re missing the parent’s point. It’s large in absolute terms but not as a percentage of GDP (3.5%). And for countries spending less, once again the point is that they’d rather spend less and lean on the US when things really hit the fan (see: European countries not chipping in the requisite 2% of GDP for NATO funding; roughly half of that “OMG so massive” US military spending goes towards NATO).

Edit: yes my bad, I was meaning this comment for another poster in the thread.

by xienze

1/15/2025 at 12:38:29 PM

...But that's exactly what I'm saying?

Seriously. You just more or less repeated what I've been saying, minus the potentially spiteful sentiment.

From my original comment:

>The reason the US defence budget is so sky-fucking-high is because we effectively pay for everyone's military, though.

by Dalewyn

1/15/2025 at 8:47:40 PM

[dead]

by canadianfella

1/15/2025 at 12:50:50 PM

> The reason the US defence budget is so sky-fucking-high is because we effectively pay for everyone's military, though

Yes, but don't act like that is some kind of selfless act. In the end, it benefits the US more if they do that and have military bases and influence all over the place, than not doing that. If that also protects their allies, even better, since then it can be used to better justify the international meddling (as you're doing now).

by shafyy

1/15/2025 at 9:50:48 AM

Nonsense, Americans pay the most for health insurance. It's merely about how you use the money. Same with education. The American economy is so great it could afford an entire second military industrial complex and still have enough money left for healthcare and education.

by throw5959

1/15/2025 at 12:33:24 PM

well, EU are enjoying NATO Protection (what I mean nato is only few nato country that really spend money on their military)

some country didn't spend as much even almost downscale its military and you expect the same benefit while didn't want any cost associated with it, how it make sense and fair for everyone???

by tonyhart7

1/15/2025 at 2:56:45 PM

You should update your information.

by 127

1/15/2025 at 11:48:17 AM

[flagged]

by suraci

1/16/2025 at 1:05:44 AM

TSMC also builds facilities in europe but they are not as advanced. Europe's strategic budget to finance such moves is much smaller. And this is purely strategic, these plants are a technology transfer program meant to de-risk the Taiwan/SK issue getting ugly. From an economic point of view, production in Asia is cheaper.

by est31

1/15/2025 at 4:21:57 PM

I thought this would never happen. I was wrong.

by kragen

1/15/2025 at 9:54:17 AM

So many people wanted this to fail.

by dtquad

1/15/2025 at 10:03:23 AM

Why?

by UltraSane

1/15/2025 at 10:35:35 AM

Many commenters on HN have this weird idea that if Taiwan is slightly ahead of competition, US would defend Taiwan against a country with nukes. Or that TSMC superiority is Taiwan's national security issue.

by YetAnotherNick

1/15/2025 at 11:05:39 AM

> Many commenters on HN have this weird idea that if Taiwan is slightly ahead of competition, US would defend Taiwan against a country with nukes. Or that TSMC superiority is Taiwan's national security issue.

Well... TSMC is definitely a component of Taiwan's national security. It's called the "Silicon Shield" for a reason.

And the US definitely has more reasons to go to war, and more importantly, threaten war to prevent one breaking out, over Taiwan if it knows there will be a massive economic impact.

And China definitely knows that if Taiwan is important for the US, it's almost certain the US would defend it.

by sofixa

1/15/2025 at 10:47:22 AM

The US would probably defend Taiwan if the CCP invaded it. I don't think we would ever use nukes.

by UltraSane

1/15/2025 at 1:03:52 PM

Taiwan would strike Three Gorges Dam and kill millions. CCP should focus on Siberia.

by nwatson

1/15/2025 at 2:50:36 PM

No they wouldn't, TW doesn't have the ordnance or ability to deliver said ordnance to structurally damage a gravity dam, especially one size of three gorges. They're much better off hitting PRC coastal nuclear (something that worries PRC planners), either way, it's suicide by war crime.

by maxglute

1/15/2025 at 10:33:04 PM

Is it still a war crime AFTER the CCP invades with the goal of completely replacing the Taiwanese government?

by UltraSane

1/16/2025 at 6:33:32 AM

Yes. If Ukraine executes Russian POWs, or firebombs Moscow, it's still a war crime even if Russia invaded with the goal of genociding them (yes, saying an ethnicity doesn't really exist and they're just confused Russians, kidnapping children to resettle elsewhere, and forcefully assimilating at gunpoint everyone in the occupied territories is genocide).

War crimes are absolute, there's no "if you weren't first, you get one free".

by sofixa

1/15/2025 at 4:19:09 PM

You cannot destroy the Largest Dam ever built with conventional Ballistic Missiles but you can level the dam with a nuclear weapon, in which case why use the nuke on a dam why not use it directly on population centers.

by mainecoder

1/15/2025 at 10:33:33 PM

because destroying the damn would kill a LOT more people. Millions.

by UltraSane

1/15/2025 at 2:27:48 PM

Honestly, if China wants to just go take that Eastern half of Russia they are welcome. Nobody would stop them and much of the world would cheer.

I've wondered if China encouraged Russia to invade Ukraine to weaken them so they can become a Chinese vassal state to supply raw materials.

by api

1/15/2025 at 4:53:54 PM

the West can take the other half

by knowitnone

1/15/2025 at 4:53:15 PM

you really think the CCP cares?

by knowitnone

1/15/2025 at 2:38:22 PM

Doesn’t TSMC building a plant in US, offset the need for US to invade Taiwan. Perhaps Taiwan expects US support out of goodwill, but I think Taiwan overestimates how much goodwill drives US politics. Taiwan might have had a better chance of getting support, if it maintained a monopoly on circuit production.

by sashank_1509

1/15/2025 at 11:02:43 AM

You think if say US bombs all the CCP's planes, CCP would sit silently and accept defeat? Same thing happened with Ukraine. NATO couldn't escalate the war at any cost, so they can just play safe and only do things that don't risk escalation.

by YetAnotherNick

1/15/2025 at 12:00:54 PM

The NATO strategy in Ukraine hasn’t been great for Ukraine, but the old cold warriors of the 1980s would be pissing their pants to find how well it worked against the Russians.

Wiping out significant portions of their army, navy, and air force for a fraction of a single year’s budget and not a single American death?

by ceejayoz

1/15/2025 at 12:42:11 PM

[flagged]

by suraci

1/15/2025 at 9:37:14 PM

From a geopolitical standpoint, for the US specifically, yes. It's probably the most cost-effective (in money and lives) military spending the US has done since WWII.

From a human standpoint, I wish they'd given the Ukranians ATACMS and HIMARS and F-16s on week two, when it was abundantly clear they had the will to fight. The dribbling out of slowly expanding limits has been painful to watch.

by ceejayoz

1/15/2025 at 12:59:34 PM

Nuclear weapons don't win wars though. Once you launch, you're dead. The retaliation will guarantee your own destruction.

The Cold War led to the arms build up it did because of exactly this paradox: on close inspection, it seemed unlikely the US would lose the Eastern seaboard cities just to protect Berlin, for example.

by XorNot

1/15/2025 at 11:43:01 AM

If the Russia case suggests anything it's that yes, they'll sit silently and absorb the losses behind all the nuclear bravado.

by varjag

1/15/2025 at 12:00:36 PM

I'm not sure I would consider Russia having sat silent though. They've continued the war for nearly 2 years now (or 10 if you go back to 2014) and have worked with allies to have foreign troops fighting on Ukrainian soil.

by _heimdall

1/15/2025 at 12:12:45 PM

The full scale invasion is entering its fourth year in fact. But I was addressing the nuclear war fears expressed above. Experience show you can hit anything in Russia (including the Kremlin) without nuclear retaliation.

by varjag

1/15/2025 at 12:29:54 PM

Yep, it takes me about a month to get the new year in my head apparently, I did the quick math based on 2024.

Anyone expecting nuclear retaliation for the strikes that have been made inside Russian territory has no grasp on what it really means for a country to use a nuke, or has no confidence in a nuclear power understanding the basic game theory of what would come next. Russia would never use a nuke when a small number of missiles or drones made it past their air defence and cause minor damage on Russian soil.

by _heimdall

1/15/2025 at 11:00:07 AM

Defend with what exactly?

by ekianjo

1/15/2025 at 1:38:00 PM

Taiwan from the invading CCP military.

by UltraSane

1/16/2025 at 9:55:26 AM

You did not answer my question. I meant defend Taiwan with what means?

by ekianjo

1/15/2025 at 11:51:24 AM

Why do you think it's a weird idea? It's a strategic asset as much as oilfields are.

by gadders

1/15/2025 at 12:23:20 PM

Because Samsung and Intel would probably close the gap by the time the war is done. They are just 2-4 years behind with the gaps already closing in.

by YetAnotherNick

1/15/2025 at 11:29:13 AM

They want war? Someone else’s, at that?

Crazy.

by jmartin2683

1/15/2025 at 11:31:51 AM

I think it’s the opposite. They want the US to defend Taiwan

by sghiassy

1/15/2025 at 1:39:05 PM

The CCP keeps saying that Taiwan is part of China.

by UltraSane

1/15/2025 at 10:45:53 AM

[dead]

by crimsonalucard

1/15/2025 at 11:13:36 AM

[flagged]

by corimaith

1/15/2025 at 12:21:35 PM

Both countries are officially named China, so only one can be right.

by jart

1/15/2025 at 1:01:46 PM

At an international politics level, what is "officially" called what doesn't mean much.

by XorNot

1/15/2025 at 4:14:53 PM

There is only One China hence the One China Policy.

by mainecoder

1/15/2025 at 4:52:27 PM

you mean One Taiwan Policy

by knowitnone

1/15/2025 at 3:28:18 PM

Many commenters just hate America.

by wumeow

1/15/2025 at 12:12:34 PM

Some people are against industrial policy (like the CHIPS Act) because they don't believe that market failure exists.

Some people are against Biden/Dems.

Some people are clueless about the foreign policy and the geopolitical reality in Asia and take the status quo regional power balance as a given.

by energy123

1/15/2025 at 10:42:24 AM

[dead]

by crimsonalucard

1/15/2025 at 2:38:33 PM

Not on the I want it to fail side but my main question is why we put this water intensive industry in Arizona instead of further east where water is less stressed as a resource?

Seems like it would be way better off being somewhere in the eastern half of the country or at least not in the Southwest.

by rtkwe

1/15/2025 at 5:26:34 PM

water is a non-issue. The main issue in deciding where a factory should go is which state will give you the most to do it.

by TrapLord_Rhodo

1/15/2025 at 4:34:59 PM

Like who? Rabid globalization fans?

by markhahn

1/15/2025 at 9:34:48 AM

Previous discussion (16 hours ago)

Apple will soon receive 'made in America' chips from TSMC's Arizona fab (tomshardware.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42699977

by alecco

1/15/2025 at 3:15:24 PM

Does this mean that you will see entirely made in the USA Macs?

by giancarlostoro

1/15/2025 at 3:20:31 PM

Depends, Do you have 10 year olds who will work for 18c an hour?

Or do you have consumers who will pay for the difference?

by swarnie

1/15/2025 at 3:32:01 PM

People already pay a premium on Macs to be honest. Every hard drive upgrade is ridiculously overpriced.

"Minecraft proves that the children yearn for the mines"

by giancarlostoro

1/15/2025 at 8:10:16 PM

Way less than they used to. The Mac "premium" has been declining for decades.

Stands to follow that many of their new customers are price-sensitive.

by Clamchop

1/15/2025 at 8:51:47 PM

> The Mac "premium" has been declining for decades.

Ever tried to configure storage on anything Apple? The markup is ridiculous, but on the other side, it blows a lot of the competition out of the water.

by mschuster91

1/15/2025 at 9:27:18 PM

This is a dumb tangent that's been beaten to death, but yes Apple base model systems to tend to be somewhat untouchable in value around when they're released. Buying something anywhere close to the form factor of a Mac mini with the same performance is nearly impossible.

We also shouldn't beat this horse to death because it's not hard to plug in a USB/Thunderbolt SSD and there's essentially no performance penalty.

Or if you have a MacBook Pro you can get one of these: https://9to5mac.com/2022/05/20/macbook-pro-flush-sd-card-tra...

Not the fastest thing in the world but it gets the job done.

by dangus

1/15/2025 at 8:00:54 PM

Marginal cost added probably isn't that much. How many manhours does a mac take to build?

by randomopining

1/15/2025 at 9:24:13 PM

Got any more of that hyperbole? Or maybe outdated xenophobia?

The average manufacturing salary in China is around $13,000 a year, in a country where cost of living is 50% lower than the US and rent is 75% lower.

China is actually a place with relatively high manufacturing labor costs these days, but it's a production center for a lot of industries and holds a lot of the ecosystems and institutional knowledge (not unlike all the automotive parts suppliers in the American Midwest).

by dangus

1/15/2025 at 3:28:06 PM

Unfortunately the USA doesn't have religious prisoners who can be coerced into a factory as slave labor.

by declan_roberts

1/15/2025 at 3:34:52 PM

Not sure the religious remarks intention, but there's jails / prisons where prisoners do labor in exchange for very low compensation. Considering you get billed for being jailed, I would personally prefer working than to mount up debt I have no way of managing.

by giancarlostoro

1/15/2025 at 10:25:41 PM

There's a program where prisoners are used as adhoc firefighters in CA.

by rbolla

1/15/2025 at 10:17:00 PM

I'm a huge proponent of incarceration reform, especially in regards to making the system more rehabilitative versus retributive. But it does no one any good spreading FUD.

> there's jails / prisons where prisoners do labor in exchange for very low compensation

Sure, but the work isn't allowed to be for private entities. They're doing government-related busywork in 99% of cases (pressing license plates, printing/cutting papers for the court, working on machinery for the police/courts, working the kitchen, etc.)

More importantly, they're not just paid monetarily but receive reduced sentences for the work.

> Considering you get billed for being jailed, I would personally prefer working than to mount up debt I have no way of managing.

You're conflating two separate systems. Prisons are where you go for long stints and generally worry about Good Time/Work Time. You can't be charged a daily fine for prison time.

Jails are intended for short stays (the drunk tank, transport to court arraignment, etc) and can have daily fines attached, in most states. In cases where county jails are used post sentencing for short-moderate stays, daily fines are generally far more limited/disallowed.

by deaddodo

1/15/2025 at 8:27:04 PM

I believe that is a reference to the treatment of Uyghurs in China.

by morgango

1/15/2025 at 9:17:57 PM

Wait what you get billed for jailtime???

by foobarian

1/15/2025 at 10:25:36 PM

In very limited situations, in general (there are 50 states, I don't know the nuances of each).

Usually only in pre-sentencing stays such as the drunk tank, pre-arraignment holding, etc. If you're sentenced, you aren't charged for that time. Additionally, it's usually waived during sentencing (if it goes that far) as a part of your Credit-Time-Served conversion.

by deaddodo

1/15/2025 at 3:33:57 PM

You might be on to something though!

If you dont mind dropping the religious aspect i think you already have the rest via the Prison-Industries Act; as cheap as an Asian child but with the strength and intelligence of the US adult prison population.

Hold on im going to write this down.

by swarnie

1/15/2025 at 3:36:27 PM

What's more interesting is that if you do it correctly, someone could leave jail / prison with interesting niche skills you could technically hire for, assuming they prove they are reformed.

by giancarlostoro

1/15/2025 at 3:31:15 PM

we do have a lot of prisoners though, and they do various factory kinda jobs. probably not high skill ones though?

by nemomarx

1/15/2025 at 4:09:14 PM

It depends, there are definitely things like carpentry and other manufacturing that prisoners do that I wouldn't call 'unskilled' by any stretch. One big reason to pay prisoners appropriately is that otherwise they affect the labor rate for trades that overlap with how prison labor is currently utilized.

by 0_____0

1/15/2025 at 8:53:30 PM

> One big reason to pay prisoners appropriately is that otherwise they affect the labor rate for trades that overlap with how prison labor is currently utilized.

Ask tradespeople how much they like competition from prisons or, in Germany, subsidised workplaces for the disabled.

by mschuster91

1/15/2025 at 9:23:57 PM

13th amendment buddy. Slavery was never fully outlawed in the US

by lovich

1/15/2025 at 3:42:08 PM

Humanoid robot workers are going to have a massive impact on industries like this. 'cheap labor' will no longer be isolated to certain regions.

by jsmcgd

1/15/2025 at 2:41:54 PM

The good thing about apple prices is they could easily not change any of their prices and just swallow the loss in profit.

But doubtful, it'll definitely be a premium made-inthe-usa labeling for government & school use.

Just grift grift grift, then graft graft graft.

by cyanydeez

1/15/2025 at 3:01:38 PM

They could do that -- then equity would correct investors would be like wait what. Exec and employee comp would decrease. Pressure to deliver consistent returns is real assuming its a material cost difference.

by boringg

1/15/2025 at 4:00:07 PM

Don't chip fabs require a great deal of water? Wondering why a place like Arizona, with serious water issues, was selected.

by insane_dreamer

1/15/2025 at 4:04:03 PM

According to TSMC: "To achieve our goal of 90% water reclamation, We will build an advanced water treatment facility (Industrial Water Reclamation Plant) at our Phoenix operation with a design goal of achieving “Near Zero Liquid Discharge”. This means the fabs will be capable of using nearly every drop of water back into the facility."

by vondur

1/15/2025 at 4:14:23 PM

While they reclaim 90% of the water, given the immense amount of water they use, it's still an exorbitant amount.

With all 6 fabs online, and water reclamation in place, it's expected to be the equivalent of 160,000 homes:

https://www.phonearena.com/news/tsmc-access-to-water-us-fabs...

Now you can and absolutely should (IMO) make the argument that the fabs are far more important than the agricultural use in the area which is far more wasteful. But someone has to step up and do that and none of the politicians in the area seem to have been willing to make a commonsense decision and say: we're done growing crops in the desert when we've got endless better options.

by tw04

1/15/2025 at 8:43:33 PM

Be easier just for Arizona to stop growing alfalfa. Its popular because they can grow two crops. According to the feds, there is 300,000 acres of alfalfa in Arizona. Cut that you have enough water saved for tens of millions of people. growing water hungry crops in the desert doesn't make sense.

https://www.nass.usda.gov/Statistics_by_State/Arizona/Public...

by adrr

1/15/2025 at 11:26:31 PM

The nice thing about the desert Southwest is that the growing season is long and the climate is hot but stable. Water is the issue, but with irrigation, not as much.

by vondur

1/15/2025 at 6:49:43 PM

Why not a place like Washington State or Oregon with abundant water and hydropower

by insane_dreamer

1/15/2025 at 8:31:23 PM

Seismic activity appears to be at least one problem. The entire West coast of the contiguous US has lots of it.

by Clamchop

1/15/2025 at 3:17:24 PM

Nice. Maybe we should have re elected that guy.

by looneysquash

1/15/2025 at 3:22:18 PM

Maybe you should have developed a technology to upload his brain.

by randomNumber7

1/15/2025 at 9:06:02 AM

The point here would be that after N years, US workers at the site would gain enough insights to replicate the processes with American companies? Because otherwise what's the point? Will TSMC allow that? Because to just have more internal "normal" jobs in the US is a small gain. There is a big ST site here in Catania, while they produce many chips most of the workers are blue collars.

by antirez

1/15/2025 at 9:09:11 AM

The point is redundancy in case China follows through on their threats to invade.

by smallerfish

1/15/2025 at 9:36:03 AM

This redundancy makes me worried that the US will view Taiwanese sovereignty as disposable. While the US has given much for the defence of Ukraine, it’s always been careful to make sure it’s not enough for Ukraine to win but only enough to make it expensive for Russia hopping they’ll reconsider. Russia has won there and I suspect they’ll joe be willing to let China have the islands now too.

by Pet_Ant

1/15/2025 at 10:11:38 AM

Selling the secret sauce to US definitely make Taiwan disposable. But I also bet TSMC doesn't have a choice as whoever in power in US can also impose sanction/tariff or whatever they can to make TSMC to compile.

by phantomathkg

1/15/2025 at 10:22:14 AM

TSMC is a publicly traded company and like all publicly traded companies it has no allegiance to any country (other than historical legacy and emotions) and will always relocate to where it's most safe and profitable for providing returns to its shareholders, just like how many profitable companies moved to UK, US and Switzerland during WW2 and how many EU companies are doing the same thing today.

If the US will provide TSMC with better deals on all fronts than what the Taiwanese government can, then there's nothing that can stop them from slowly abandoning Taiwan and moving the HQ and vital operations to the US over time, especially that the Taiwanese government is not a major shareholder in TSMC.

by Cumpiler69

1/15/2025 at 10:35:51 AM

Companies don't magically not have any humans in them as soon as they are on a stock market.

by boxed

1/15/2025 at 12:07:11 PM

How does this invalidate what I said?

Have you heard of Operation Paperclip? The moment China steps in Taiwan, all those vital TSMC engineers will be flown to the US along with the critical IP and given a blank cheque to replicate Taiwan operation on US soil ASAP. TSMC is preemptively building the infrastructure there in preparation for such an event, so it can outlive whatever happens to Taiwan. TSMC has little inventive to tie itself to Taiwan and its people who are not its employees. Every big company thinks and acts like this. Taiwan can't force TSMC to stay there if it doesn't want to.

by Cumpiler69

1/15/2025 at 2:09:17 PM

Reminder that TSMC WANTs to stay in TW... they did not want to expand in US at all. Arizona fab annoucement after months rumormill was big surprise at the time since TSMC did massive TW capex expansion and had no $$$ for US fabs, and it was combination of CHIPS carrots ($$$) and US sticks that got Arizona greenlit. Morris Chang publically said CHIPS would fail to get US semi leadership, that US policy is "doomed" / "futile", that is not the words of someone who wanted to erode TW's silicon shield. IMO TSMC Arizona's current (likely ongoing) dependence on imported TW talent makes it pretty clear TW is keeping tight leash.

>Taiwan can't force TSMC

IIRC TW foreign minister said a few years ago it was pure American wishcasting to expect TSMC employees to be evacuated before TW women and children. Around the same time TW politicians rebuffed the idea that TW would destroy their own fabs. That's TW's leverage, they control who gets on and off the planes and boats. Reality is if PRC makes a move, they'll lock down the airfield and shores, that's PRC's leverage - to control if planes and boats get to leave in the first place. Ultimately, TW politicians knows locking semi talent on the island is leverage, especially if they lose, because most of them won't have a ticket off the island.

Not to mention paperclip is the victors getting the spoils, and US is far from assured any victory or there would be any TSMC employees left to paperclip if motivated PRC wants to deny. Or that TSMC is like 70k people excluding their families. 300k if you include other direct TW semi employment. More if you include indirect (supply chain), and ultimately there's considerable sole source semi suppliers on TW that TSMC US won't be functional just like how ASML can shut down hardware by stopping inputs for maintenance. It's not just packaging and domestic talent that's another bottleneck, TSMC Arizona stops with TW inputs as much as it doesn't without ASML ones. And so far there's no real public plan to reshore that supply chain in US.

by maxglute

1/15/2025 at 1:04:17 PM

Paperclip happened after Germany lost the war.

by XorNot

1/15/2025 at 1:15:24 PM

I don't see how this is relevant or invalidates my point. You think the US will wait for the end of the war to do that or what?

Also, German scientists who could leave the country were fleeing to the US before the Nazi regime started WW2 and also during the war, before it was a formal operation to gather them as prisoners of war when Germany lost.

by Cumpiler69

1/17/2025 at 12:09:51 AM

How is the US going to extract a whole bunch of Taiwanese citizens from an island which will be under a Chinese naval encirclement?

The point is that Operation Paperclip happened in the aftermath of a total strategic defeat of the German army, where the Allies were the victorious power.

Taiwanese scientists and engineers are currently living happily in Taiwan, which is not a fascist regime cracking down on civil liberties. So they're not going to flee before the war, and once the war starts "extract significant numbers of educated personnel" is literally identical in military complexity to "fight and defeat the Chinese naval blockade".

by XorNot

1/15/2025 at 11:53:09 AM

It's about as close as you can get though to capital efficiently allocating itself

by mistercheph

1/15/2025 at 10:49:40 AM

In the game betwen China and the US, the legal status and 'allegiance' of TSMC is not relevant. What is relevant is who controls the fabs, i.e. where the fabs are physically located.

It is also naive to think that governments (US and especially ROC/Taiwan) do not have influence over TSMC. This sort of thing is not necessarily measured by level of shareholding.

by mytailorisrich

1/15/2025 at 11:05:00 AM

> Taiwanese sovereignty as disposable

Your are describing the statu quo as almost no country officially recognizes Taiwan

by ekianjo

1/15/2025 at 10:08:03 AM

Short of nuclear weapons, I'm not sure what would allow Ukraine to "win". Even given all the hardware, Ukraine doesn't have the staff or experience to field a full NATO air wing and integrate it to fight according to NATO combined arms doctrine -- if that even WOULD produce a "win" (there is an untested assumption that a NATO-standard military could trounce Russia)

by ForHackernews

1/15/2025 at 1:09:45 PM

Ukraine needs to hold the line, keep Russia sanctioned and let it burn itself out economically...or wait for Putin to die.

The Russian economy is grinding to dust right now, and the Soviet vehicle inheritance evaporating.

At some point, they stop being able to pay workers and troops, and while martial law can keep things moving, it's all getting much more expensive after that.

Putin has been very careful to try and keep the war awaybfrom his Moscow powerbase...so it's clear he recognises his authority and position is far from unlimited.

by XorNot

1/15/2025 at 1:24:07 PM

I agree with all that, but none of that translates to a traditional battlefield triumph. Maybe providing more long-range weapons would enable symbolic strikes near Moscow or on oligarchs' dachas, but that's the only case I can think of where materiel might help with that strategy.

Ukraine needs more soldiers, hard without full conscription, with the pool of heroic volunteers already committed, and it needs more artillery shells, that NATO can't readily supply because NATO never imagined playing quartermaster this kind of warfare in the 21st century.

by ForHackernews

1/15/2025 at 2:59:44 PM

Ukraine can't even properly equip the soldiers it already has. Supporting countries could dig a lot deeper in their supplies, they will have ample time to rearm.

by actionfromafar

1/15/2025 at 4:10:11 PM

Ukraine needs boots on the ground. Finland and Poland from the West driving on Moscow for a regime change with the rest of NATO behind them.

But apparently Ukraine are developing nuclear weapons so we'll see.

by Pet_Ant

1/15/2025 at 10:43:26 AM

TSMC being 2-4 years ahead of Samsung/Intel has nothing to do whether US would be willing to go on a nuclear war and move the entire world decades if not millenias back. No one can go on a direct war with a country with nukes unless they are ready for mutually assured destruction.

by YetAnotherNick

1/15/2025 at 11:55:34 AM

Russia thought the same when it thought it could hide behind its nukes. Alas.

by questinthrow

1/15/2025 at 6:12:04 PM

>As of September 30, 2024, the U.S. Ukraine response funding totals nearly $183 billion >Russia's official 2022 military budget is expected to be 4.7 trillion rubles ($75bn), or higher, and about $84bn for 2023

by oremolten

1/15/2025 at 12:16:58 PM

And it did. US could do very very significant harm to Russia's military if nuclear retaliation wasn't a threat. And probably that would be cheaper than the weapons/training that they are giving to Ukraine.

by YetAnotherNick

1/15/2025 at 2:58:30 PM

Sorry, but this leads to nuclear proliferation. This means unless you have nukes, you are a nobody.

At this point it's better to just have that nuclear war instead of the rest of us being pawn of nuclear states. There is no dignity in this.

by Pet_Ant

1/15/2025 at 4:48:17 PM

Well I commend you that would rather live in a post nuclear hellscape dystopia rather than be the citizen of a vassal state of a Nuclear Power.

by mainecoder

1/15/2025 at 3:21:57 PM

the current regime will make choices based on what's profitable for the companies involved. It's unlikely that losing TSMC will improve profits for American companies, so having this redundancy is for short term applications.

The business interests _are_ the political landscape today.

by cyanydeez

1/15/2025 at 10:34:15 AM

> they’ll be willing to let China have the islands now too

The islands are Chinese. The US back Taiwan as an anti-communist and anti-China (divide and conquer) tactic, including because its location. If the communists had lost the civil war, the mainland and Taiwan would all have remained under ROC control and it would have been interesting to see what the US would have come up with, instead (academic and thought experiment but interesting to imagine nonetheless).

In Ukraine the US don't want to be dragged in a war against Russia and things have played well for them so far (really the US are the only winners so far).

by mytailorisrich

1/15/2025 at 10:49:41 AM

> The islands are Chinese.

"In June 2008, a TVBS poll found that 68% of the respondents identify themselves as "Taiwanese" while 18% would call themselves "Chinese".[33] In 2015, a poll conducted by the Taiwan Braintrust showed that about 90 percent of the population would identify themselves as Taiwanese rather than Chinese.[34]" [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwanese_people

by throwaway494932

1/15/2025 at 10:53:50 AM

That is quite irrelevant in addition to being misleading.

by mytailorisrich

1/15/2025 at 11:12:16 AM

The same way as Ukrainians wanting to live in an independent country is irrelevant?

by rob74

1/15/2025 at 11:42:27 AM

I like thought experiment.

let's think

1. CCP took over California by force 2. CCP killed everyone who resists 3. CCP leaved, but built a puppet regime 4. The puppet regime rewrite schoolbook, taught everyone they're not American 5. 100 years later, a poll found that 68% of the respondents identify themselves as Californians

I must admit this is a bad thought experiment because Americans lives in a stolen land, it's not same as Taiwan

by suraci

1/15/2025 at 2:51:18 PM

Taiwan has an aboriginal population as well, there are very few countries where the original settlers are recognizable as the current population without squinting. China is one of the worst offenders, with the westward expansion of the Qing Empire contemporary with American westward expansion. Moreover, when America started serious decolonizing in the 20th Century (Philippines) and ending residential schools, China invaded Tibet and continues to pursue aggressive assimilation in its Western regions.

by ozborn

1/15/2025 at 6:47:40 PM

China is not a single-ethnicity country. For thousands of years, most of the time, the majority and minority ethnic groups have lived together on this land. There have been wars and integrations thousands times and thousans years. this must be hard for you to understand, right? I can understand that you might unconsciously use your own history to comprehend the history of Asia. In addition, all forms of ethnic separatism have the support of the United States. But I think you already know this.

BTW, the Qing Empire is rule by a minority ethnic(满族)

And, by race, we are all Asians, can you understand the difference?

You are like comparing the genocide of Native Americans to a war between two Native American tribes.

by suraci

1/15/2025 at 9:07:43 PM

We wouldn't let native american tribes take each others land nowadays either.

by Pet_Ant

1/16/2025 at 1:34:41 AM

as I said, it's a bad thought experiment

let's go furthur abt this experiment

1. native american tribes took each others land, in the end, it became a single national country - Amerikka, for hundreds years 2. CPC came, colonized Amerikka, when it leaves, it splited California, did things I listed above

still, a bad thought experiment, because

> We wouldn't let native american tribes take each others land nowadays either

you've already took all their land, so they can not take each others land anymore

as i said it's hard for you to understand such things, you are in the totally different history background, you're in the colonizers' view, colonized America has became the status quo to you

If the US is currently in a state of division, with one part being a puppet regime under CPC (or Russians) control, you would find it easier to understand this problem.

by suraci

1/15/2025 at 11:39:34 AM

Change of subject? Russia's main aim in Ukraine was/is regime change ('main' because they obviously do want to annex the Donbas), a bit like what happened in Iraq in 2003...

I did not expect to be able to seriously discuss geopolitics here, TBH, it never works and it is never possible to dig deeper. Case in point...

by mytailorisrich

1/15/2025 at 12:13:43 PM

Actually I agree with you - if Russia's main aim in Ukraine was changing the regime, that would have turned Ukraine into something like Belarus, which I don't really consider independent...

by rob74

1/15/2025 at 10:59:45 AM

[flagged]

by suraci

1/15/2025 at 11:04:03 AM

China has no needs to invade when they can do a very effective blockade without firing one shot.

by ekianjo

1/15/2025 at 10:51:41 AM

"invade" = western propaganda

The proper word is "reunite", as it was agreed with the US

It sure gonna hurt the US Military industrial complex, no war = no money

"1982 U.S.-PRC Joint Communiqué/Six Assurances

As they negotiated establishment of diplomatic relations, the U.S. and PRC governments agreed to set aside the contentious issue of U.S. arms sales to Taiwan. They took up that issue in the 1982 August 17 Communiqué, in which the PRC states “a fundamental policy of striving for peaceful reunification” with Taiwan, and the U.S. government states it “understands and appreciates” that policy. The U.S. government states in the 1982 communiqué that with those statements “in mind,” “it does not seek to carry out a long-term policy of arms sales to Taiwan,” and “intends gradually to reduce its sale of arms to Taiwan, leading, over a period of time, to a final resolution.” The U.S. government also declares “no intention” of “pursuing a policy of ‘two Chinas,’” meaning the PRC and the ROC, “or ‘one China, one Taiwan.’”"

https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF12503/1

by WhereIsTheTruth

1/15/2025 at 11:27:57 AM

> "invade" = western propaganda

> The proper word is "reunite", as it was agreed with the US

So the US and the PRC had some milquetoast diplomatic correspondence which did not include Taiwan. If the PRC now occupies Taiwan against the will of its people and population, presumably under fire from the Taiwanese army, it' just a "reunification"?

by thworp

1/15/2025 at 12:38:15 PM

Taiwanese are pro-reunification, Tsai wich is pro-US and pro-indepandance had quit due to her party loosing local elections

https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/Taiwan-elections/Taiwan-s-T...

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b4/2024_Leg...

by WhereIsTheTruth

1/15/2025 at 1:55:39 PM

An election result is not a single-issue poll and the current government supports the status quo anyway (just being fundamentally more open to dialogue). A clear majority of the opulation supports de-facto independence (the current status) or even formal independence [0].

[0] https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2023/09/02/...

by thworp

1/15/2025 at 5:10:17 PM

"It's only a democracy if the results suits our interests"

You are not being objective, a poll is not a vote

In a vote, the registered population gets to vote using official ID

In a poll, only 'god' knows who the respondents are

by WhereIsTheTruth

1/16/2025 at 7:40:31 AM

But no big party supports reunification with the current Chinese government, at best they have it as a long term goal. The election results do not show what you're claiming.

by thworp

1/16/2025 at 4:32:55 AM

Even when presented with facts and argumentation, people still downvote, i guess there is no turning back

No blood on my hands!

by WhereIsTheTruth

1/15/2025 at 6:04:46 PM

Very misleading to link to the legislative election results, when the KMT party only won 33% of the Presidential vote. And on top of that the KMT's actions when in power are to preserve the status quo (effectively independent, make money, avoid war), even if their long term vision is peaceful unification with a democratic China.

by sct202

1/15/2025 at 10:02:51 AM

I know Intel has also opened a site nearby. Rumor is that many of the TSMC staff, having seen the lifestyle of American engineers in Arizona have started quietly applying with Intel.

by ForHackernews

1/15/2025 at 3:37:31 PM

No that’s not the goal — having the fabs onshore means US intelligence agencies and executive/legislative branch will have access. This is contra to Taiwan where the Taiwanese government oversees this access.

Some people might like the sound of this, some might hate it, but day to day, there are significant portions of the US gov workforce who deal with counter espionage, corporate safety, and of course more publicized are the parts that enforce or “request” compliance with US goals, mandates, projects and so on.

Once a factory is on shore, literally on your sovereign land, you have a lot more say.

No different than wanting your banking managed on networks in your country, or your weapons manufactured in country.

That said, generally states have competed for sites like this, and cities like San Jose, Austin and Portland have benefited from having large silicon industry economic bases. I can’t speculate if TSMC will benefit local industry that much, but I imagine it can’t hurt — it’s extra jobs, and probably a boost for suppliers that are convenient to the foundries.

by vessenes

1/15/2025 at 6:08:35 PM

Can someone explain to me how they can keep the price of the chip production the same in the US compared to Taiwan?

Labour, especially specialized labour, is a lot more expensive in the US.

by spprashant

1/15/2025 at 6:19:43 PM

It didn’t say that it was the same price? Customers want them produced in the US, so will probs pay extra for it. Especially given that politically it’s a good look for them

Also, the US govt has put in a lot of subsidies

by ajb257

1/15/2025 at 9:30:42 PM

At this point it's not really a lot more expensive especially when factories are so heavily automated.

The US has had semiconductor fabs for many years that are still operating. It just so happens that TSMC has the best process, but I don't think that has anything to do with labor costs.

by dangus

1/15/2025 at 6:29:54 PM

this likely helps:

> Congress created a $52.7 billion semiconductor manufacturing and research subsidy program in 2022. Commerce convinced all five leading edge semiconductor firms to locate fabs in the United States as part of the program.

> The TSMC award from Commerce also includes up to $5 billion in low-cost government loans.

This is a big deal for the US Gov because chip manufacturing is ground zero for "staying competitive" against global competition, e.g. China, who is eating the US' lunch in most areas

by zzzeek

1/16/2025 at 4:14:18 AM

Few can imagine the complexity of spooling up a world-class fab. Marvel of engineering.

by ziofill

1/15/2025 at 8:39:09 AM

For some reason I’m concerned with being able to find the labor required to make this succeed. I really wish them the best.

by dr_dshiv

1/15/2025 at 7:57:26 PM

It's not like silicon chip manufacturing was an industry that many Americans could get a job in. So it makes sense that the country wouldn't have that many people able to fill these roles, or universities churning out people with those skills.

It's a chicken and egg problem. Which is why this fab will import worker while local universities put into place pipelines to educate potential candidates and hopefully make the industry self-sufficient.

by mywittyname

1/15/2025 at 3:24:16 PM

they are making wafers, those have to be sent to china to make the finals chips... in the case of a war this is not great

by icf80

1/15/2025 at 8:08:00 PM

Until 2027 - when the packaging facilities are complete in Peoria.

Rome wasn't built in a day.

by onlyrealcuzzo

1/15/2025 at 3:56:29 PM

Taiwan ≠ China

by victorbjorklund

1/15/2025 at 3:27:15 PM

A step in the right direction but we still have an ocean to cross for our domestic semi industry.

by declan_roberts

1/15/2025 at 3:45:36 PM

to taiwan

by whimsicalism