Texas Instruments' $60B U.S. project, the next iPhone chips fabric
74 comments
·August 22, 2025niemandhier
simonh
It depends what the minimal needs are, but basically the US has this for chips already. Yes the US only makes older chips, but in fact those are the ones that really matter, that you can’t do without. The ones that are in everything.
However making everything domestically just isn’t really viable for any country any more. The scale of our technological civilization and the diversity of goods and materials it depends on is more that any one continent can support, let alone one country.
It would be possible to collapse that down to one continent if absolutely necessary, but it would be incredibly economically painful and the US would need to give up on a lot of non-essentials and other priorities to devote resources to duplicating capacity that already exists elsewhere.
ksec
I think it is not about one country doing to all. But technology transfer should happen within like minded countries and within a smaller circle. So may be two continents max.
jvanderbot
Buying rocks and exporting chips is fine. Of course it's not that extreme but the sentiment is there. It's about expertise capital and concentrating that domestically.
Barrin92
>It does not matter that the home grown product can only compete with government support,
Even that isn't a given, because unless you have amassed a certain amount of technocratic and governmental competency chances are it can't compete even with government support and you just produce crony dysfunctional companies.
And of course there's economic trade offs. If you're politically ordering your economy to make chips, it doesn't make something else, and whatever it was making and trading for chips it was better at, and so you get fewer chips, that's comparative advantage. Industrial policy (and tariffs) do not increase aggregate production, they reduce it. And given that the circle of items you "can't do without" seems to be a bit of a moving target these days, at some point you're actually more brittle because you've replaced large chunks of the market with state production.
treyd
People take it as an assumption that cronyism will always happen if the government invests too strongly/consistently in a certain thing. But cronyism is a policy and structural failure, it's usually because the incentives for the different parties involved encourage it to happen. Institutions can be designed carefully if policymakers actually want to do it.
USPS is a great example of an organization that's managed to largely avoid this. Whenever you mention that people crawl out of the woodwork to complain about the 7 different times they lost their package, but their logistics at scale is still unmatched by the private sector, while also not completely negating the value of private sector alternatives (which so often is argued would happen if the government actively started doing anything new).
manquer
It is established economic theory not just some opinion . Constraints in form of regulations, subsidies, tariffs by government intervention will produce inefficiencies.
This is the core economic philosophy behind both the modern centre right[2] i.e. neoliberal democrats (80s-today) and the right wing republican conservatives (pre MAGA -2016).[1]
Even communists would agree this is correct, it is understood in different levels since Adam Smith invisible hand, from far left to centre left just posit that different polices that benefit the people not the economy are worth the cost .
That is actually true for all other groups except anarchists and libertarians all agree government intervention is needed in some form, they just disagree on how .
——-
Postal services anywhere in the world are inefficient by design. They are governed by universal service obligation principles not efficiency same with telecom providers and other utilities.
The question then becomes how much inefficiency is acceptable given the objectives . There are no right answers, you could have competing private couriers who dump unprofitable low density routes to USPS while serving profitable ones themselves (UPS, fedEX, Amazon ) or you could have gigantic postal service which is sole delivery provider socialist style, there are going to be some problems either way.
It is just matter of preference which set of trade offs we are okay with .
—-
[1] Post MAGA it is a populist party economically there is no fixed ideology to be characterized
[2] the centre right label is economic and technical to contrast say the socialist left party of FDR/New Deal 1930-70s, not meant to offend.
mgraczyk
How? What if we just decide we will never go to war with Mexico or Canada and get comfortable with the idea of importing from our allies? There is no serious future risk from doing that
like_any_other
> go to war
It won't be war. It'll be one-sided trade deals [1,2], and a slow erosion of economic and political sovereignty, culminating in a puppet state.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada-China_Promotion_and_Rec...
[2] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/fipa-agreement-with-china-wha...
mgraczyk
One sided trade deals in which they continue exporting to us and import less
There is plenty of risk that our neighbors stop importing and almost no risk they stop exporting
topspin
> if we just decide we will never go to war with...
That's hubris. Although the US does indulge elective wars, one does not always get to choose with whom one will war.
mgraczyk
Okay so make a prediction. What is the probability that Canada or Mexico will declare war on the United States in the next 100 years?
theteapot
It's an extension of a peace through strength philosophy. If you lose your critical sovereign capabilities you become weak and vulnerable. You no longer get to decide who you do and don't "never go to war with".
mgraczyk
Yes I understand the reasoning, it's just obviously wrong. This doesn't happen and hasn't happened in hundreds of years. This is not why people get invaded, otherwise Switzerland would have been invaded many times over the last century
fidotron
This kind of answers your own question: the reality is you are only a reliable US ally [1] if you can hold them by the balls TSMC style. Given that countries go to great lengths to develop and maintain such dependencies. Canada's current weakness is at least in part because it has failed to do so.
[1] Edit to add: This was/is poorly worded - I mean that the US will only guarantee that you remain an ally while they are in some sense dependent on you, and while doing so they may work to break that dependence, which you may interpret as them trying to abandon you.
mgraczyk
You are claiming that Canada will stop exporting to the US in the future? Populism does the opposite, they would likely stop importing. There's almost no risk to us that they would not export chips
null
dmix
Russia has been totally isolated from global market and they are still producing hundreds of cruise missiles a month just fine. America could easily figure it out long enough to survive a few yrs of conflict. Even stockpiling 10yr old chips would be good enough 95% of military industry. Then emergency investment and smuggling will cover the rest.
Meanwhile cutting off your markets and wasting hundreds of billions on a long term bet with a small probability that another global war will happen is pretty dumb financial thinking.
Tariffs and corporate welfare will actively make a country poorer and create unproductive zombie markets while raising taxes on everyone. Not to mention diverting budgets and new revenue away from actual national security investment.
msgodel
Up until relatively recently we were the SOTA and #1 semiconductor exporter. When people talked about the "american manufacturing sector" a significant portion of it was actually that.
Those foundries didn't go away, they're still manufacturing with the same capabilities they used to (and they're much cheaper now since they're competing with the better ones in Taiwan.)
It's good to hear TI hasn't given up on high performance SOCs as it was beginning to look like they had. But most of this stuff is still here. Freescale and many other American companies are still making the same (better even) chips they always have which is more than enough for cruise missiles (more than enough for decent PDAs and smartphones really) even without "stockpiling."
dmix
Yes and those Russian semiconductors aren't sophisticated or high end at all which supports my point. The military isn't making cellphones, they make missiles and fly jets with decade old computer chips. A few years of war with China is not going to magically eliminate all computer chips. The global market will still exist in some form and wars are far more motivating than a few government grants.
Not to mention China (and/or Taiwan) is still going to want to sell to someone to survive, and those countries can smuggle them into America - just like Russia does for it's drone industry and oil. America is much more capable in that regards with NATO and it's huge purchasing power.
I still think TI and Apple should be investing in foundries and domestically. It should just make sense as a business otherwise it's going to be a very expensive embarrassment.
ThinkBeat
The transfer of wealth from tax payers to tech giants has never been better. Enormous state subsidies. For doing something the free market would do if it made economic sense.
How many bailouts is Intel on now?
The idea of forcing a merger between Intel and TMSC at what could be called be barrel of the gun, would at least make it (indirectly) Taiwan that would have to take over paying for Intel.
ksec
>For doing something the free market would do if it made economic sense.
It didn't make sense.
Bailout?
Merging Intel and TSMC?
Sorry I am not following.
_trampeltier
Desperate measures to save Intel: US reportedly forcing TSMC to buy 49% stake in Intel to secure tariff relief for Taiwan
foobarbecue
Is fabric here a mistranslation of "fabrica"? Correct translation would be "factory."
pavlov
Probably it should be “fabrication plant”.
Chip manufacturing factories are traditionally called fabs, short for that.
piltdownman
Who needs ownership when you can enrich your cronies playing the options market with the frozen Orange Juice futures report in-hand a la Trading Places
declan_roberts
What exactly are you talking about?
pstuart
The movie Trading Places. It's a comedy and worth a watch.
OhMeadhbh
I'm guessing the commenter above was asking what trading places and commodities futures have to do with the referenced article. I'm trying to figure out if you view Trump + cronies as the good guys in Trading Places (Dan Aykroyd + Eddie Murphy) or the bad guys (Ralph Bellamy + Don Ameche). Or if you think the old institutional guys conspiring to ruin young Dan Aykroyd's life over a bet were the bad guys or the good guys? I'm not trying to be snarky, it's just that there are a lot of opinions offered on this site and we don't all view the world the same way.
bix6
“As for federal support, TI got $1.6 billion of CHIPS Act funding, and a whopping 35% investment tax credit from Trump’s big bill passed in July.”
So how much ownership is the US gov gonna get in this one?
readthenotes1
TI is a going concern, no bailout necessary
lokar
Intel is not getting any money that legislation (law) had not already allocated to them. The transfer of shares to the Gov is just a shakedown.
givemeethekeys
Just? You mean they should have received the stupidly large sum of money without anything for the tax payer?
OhMeadhbh
Sure.. calculators and MSP430s for remote power meters are keeping TI from closing up shop, but TI doesn't have the capitalization structure to bring up a fab for the types of chips people say they want. I mean sure... If you want to make 28nm chips, they're fine, and you can do a lot with 1 and 2 GHz parts, but... We keep saying we want to make the chips in the states that they're making in Shenzhen and Taipei... And honestly, a $1.6B grant from daddy warbucks may not be enough to prevent TI from taking the money and dropping out of the program in a few years.
And this comes from a place of love... My family's been invested in GSI for almost 100 years
dkdcio
> calculators and MSP430s for remote power meters are keeping TI from closing up shop
calculators have consistently been a minor percentage of TI’s business (~5% of profits per source below). I doubt MSP430s in particular amount to a huge percentage either
one random source: https://www.meta-calculator.com/blog/ti-graphing-calculator-... (this is pretty easy info to find)
vel0city
Microcontrollers and calculators are a small part of TI's revenues. Most (>70%) of their revenues come from analog devices like amplifiers, DC-DC converters, ADC/DACs, and things like that.
They make important chips and many top of the line products of their segments but they're not things like server grade CPUs or GPUs.
EFreethought
What does GSI refer to? Googling did not lead to any obvious results.
NooneAtAll3
will this fix xkcd 768 problem, tho?
lotsofpulp
Do teenagers even use those calculators anymore?
Chips are like agriculture: It does not matter that the home grown product can only compete with government support, you never want to be in a position where you cannot provide for your country’s minimal needs purely from local sources.