Intel has a fab a few miles away, and setting aside Intel's challenges, they're producing chips just fine. Semiconductor production is massively automated and the wafers are ludicrously high revenue/margin products. This isn't like using US labor to stitch t-shirts.

Modern high-end fabs have extremely expensive equipment and are highly automated... like they are so automated that people don't actually handle wafers... it is almost all robotic.

Thus, salaries and cost of services do not factor in as heavily as you might think to fab economics.

Data suggests that TSMC's per wafer costs in Arizona are 10-30% higher than Taiwan and that Arizona fab is relatively new. It's economics will probably improve over time, narrowing the margin to 5-15%.

Looking towards the future, power costs and other global supply chain factors could very easily make TSMC's Arizona fab less expensive and more reliable to operate over time. For one, the US is completely energy independent... Taiwan is not.

US Workers while costing more do seem are still competitive at expensive high value tasks. There was some reports a year back where the TSMC labs in Arizona while employee costs were higher also had 4% higher yield [1].

I'd wager combining that with US defense contracts for US made chips would be lucrative for NVidia.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41952534

Well.. considering the mark up for the H100's is like 80 grand. I think there is a little wiggle room.

Salaries aren't a huge part of manufacturing like people think. Once the factory is built, accounting for logistics of shipping and remote management, it's not a huge difference financially.

Getting the factory built, however, takes significantly more time and costs more in both actual dollars but, more importantly, the opportunity cost lost to not producing products in that extra build time.

Some hardware any superpower should be able to produce on home soil almost no matter the cost. That's why even Russia keeps domestic fabs making chips at some ancient process node - not to sell them for profit, but to maintain an ability to produce chips for the military and their own economy should things go down as they say.

semi manufacturing is highly automated, and not much of the cost is labor.

In terms of Labour, the number one cost of a node is R&D. And that is happening in Taiwan not in US.

And if US could somehow provide lower electricity cost to Fabs, which is the number one cost in production, it will offset a lot of expensive items on the list. The actual labour cost for running the Fab is comparatively small.

What I find weird is that a year ago there were reports in the NYT and elsewhere that TSMC was unable to make the AZ plant work because of lazy / dumb Americans. And then 6 months later, poof, 180, the reports were that they were right on track???

Just print more money, it's a matter of national security. If the US is in a distrustful state, it's a good investment for the government, military or non-military (e.g. global trade getting more expensive for various reasons).

It is a few generations behind: Blackwell is still on N4, which is an N5 variant. Meanwhile TSMC has been shipping N3 family processes in large volume products (Apple) for more than 2 years already, and is starting to ramp the next major node family (N2) for Apple et al. next year.

NVIDIA has often lagged on process, since they drive such large dies, but having the first major project demo wafer on N4 now is literally 2 generations behind Taiwan.

If only Kim Il Sung were still alive to hear you

Yes, the Phoenix fab plant was indeed kickstarted under Trump's first term.

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>The EU was funding fab lines, several levels back up the chain IIRC?

Yeah but much larger(16-12nm) and much less profitable nodes than what Taiwan, the US or even Japan and China have now.

> I'm just saying the idea you can't be successful if you make cruder, older resolution chips is probably wrong

Define success. Smallest nodes are bringing in the most profits and every country prefers more profits versus less profits, especially Europe given it's budget deficits and welfare spending.

Larger nodes that aren't very profitable are good for national security but Russia and even North Korea are proof you don't need much domestic semiconductor industry to completely terrorize neighboring countries and level entire cities. WW1-style artillery shells and rifle rounds will do just fine.

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usd is down 10% since he got elected

Background: The CHIPS and Science Act, which is the key legislation behind the major incentives and on-shoring of semiconductor manufacturing in general and this achievement specifically, was signed into law by Biden on August 9, 2022.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHIPS_and_Science_Act

This was announced in 2020 under Trump's administration.

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Surely US soil is fine..? Best, most free and definitely most democratic soil in the world.

I prefer mine with milk

What other options are there for Nvidia? EU as a whole is largely non-viable due to the schizophrenic nature of EU regulations. AI development has been made de-facto illegal in EU, auto industry is being ran to the ground, so there are hardly any customers for GPU's. Now mainland China certainly would be an interesting option, but State Department would throw a shitfit.

More fun to just make Taiwan into a US State