America’s semiconductor boom
40 comments
·October 16, 2025AxiomaticSpace
ggm
Fabs need pretty solid foundations IIRC, the systems don't like vibration. So this won't have been a cheap build. I also believe the construction methods for clean room is like a VOC purge on steroids. Whatever else goes into this build would have a huge impact on potentially reclaiming it for VLSI.
ojbyrne
New CEO started in March, I vaguely recall him cancelling fabs.
x3n0ph3n3
So are they going to give back the money they got from the feds to build them?
eclipticplane
lol.
dboreham
I left the semiconductor industry 30 years ago but back then every company had "a fab that hasn't been completed in Arizona" that people would talk fondly of perhaps opening one day if business picks up. Seems like not much has changed.
itsnowandnever
I always thought it was funny that for my entire lifetime people have talked about Arizona being perfect for fabs because it's dry there and not subject to tremors meanwhile Taiwan where 60% of all chips are produced (and 90% of the most sensitive ones) is tropical and has earthquakes fairly frequently.
ansk
I can only imagine what the Taiwanese can do in Arizona. Truly a synergy for the ages.
hshdhdhehd
Maybe chaos monkeys help innovation
maplant
I mean, not to sound rude, but of course it would be someone high up who would make that decision. It’s not like a grunt could decide to scrap a whole new fab
AxiomaticSpace
Yea fair. What I was trying to say was that it seemed like a decision that was less the construction/development team saying "this plan isn't workable for xyz reason and we need to reconsider our approach" and more someone high up saying "we are cancelling this and we won't say why".
vivalahn
I could be wrong but I’d assume what the OP is trying to say is that the leadership of these companies does not want these fabs to actually open and work. That something transpired maybe between them and govt.
bee_rider
No, it was me, sorry, I was dropping off the sand for the chips. Couldn’t find this Airyzone place so I gave up and made a nice sandcastle instead. It was definitely a premium sandcastle, but the tide took it away.
tonyhart7
well, intel is loser on semiconductor boom
phendrenad2
This is actually a good video (I say actually because this youtuber sometimes has surface-level reporting on things, but this one is quite a bit better).
It's investigative on-the-ground reporting of the TSMC plant in Arizona, and the recent SemiCon West conference.
darquomiahw
What's TSMC's headcount down in AZ? I ask because Intel has laid off or retired around 40k employees in the past two years and they still need to cut a little more to please the new boss.
alephnerd
Ime, most of those cuts were employees working on legacy nodes and processes - especially at Beaverton.
fungi
how competitive will american made cpu's be? will american consumers just end up paying n * more for same product that the rest of the world gets from taiwan?
bee_rider
I don’t think the mix of engineers we’ve been producing is right for this. We need a whole generation of folks at a higher hardware:software ratio. Check back in a decade to see if we’ve seriously started.
edverma2
Does America need to produce the talent or can they import it?
rangestransform
America could import it if the current administration wasn’t so hell bent on repelling global talent through inflicting great cost and uncertainty upon the talent
coliveira
They cannot produce it (in large quantities) and it's getting harder and harder to import talent.
epistasis
The talent is already here, the employers just need to pay better.
chris_wot
Well, they can't import it any more.
ojbyrne
I am guessing that it’s a highly automated process, so per unit costs are not going to be affected much by the cost of labor.
yieldcrv
Have you seen how much of a premium Americans are already paying for chips in the face of constrained supply?
Gamers are still buying them and so is everyone else
Given that this is the same curiosity and question since pre-pandemic and now we have many examples of a premium, I think its not a real worry as long as the chips perform
nebula8804
I keep seeing this in every industry. "We can't give up America because they buy so much"
"China needs the American market because they can't make up the numbers for the rest of the world combined in the short term"
Can people here help answer where the heck does everyone have the money to buy all this stuff? Especially post COVID with all the layoffs? The US is only 5% of the world population. Europe isn't that poor and many chunks of Asia have a lot of wealth now. Yet America's appetite and more importantly capability of absorbing all manner of goods remains unimpaired...how?!
coliveira
Of course cost is an issue. If costs are higher than in Asia, everybody else in the world is going to buy Asian chips, not American ones.
walsh404
Get ready for your 8 year repayment plan with TMOBILE!
echelon
Is America's semiconductor boom real?
How much capacity are we building?
What processes? What types of semiconductor products? High end? Middle? Low?
How much capacity?
Can we substitute or replace Taiwan in the future in the event of conflict?
I can't watch the video right now, but I'm curious about its claims. Or any additional HNer context.
phendrenad2
This video has lots of details, but conspicuously absent is exactly WHAT chips are being made in Arizona. I guess it's still a closely-guarded secret for some reason.
coliveira
It's not the high-end type. Otherwise they would announce it.
This is just anecdote, but my roommate's dad works in construction management specifically for semiconductor fabs, and he was working for about a year on one of Intel's new fabs in Arizona up until a few months ago when the entire project was suddenly scrapped. IIRC he got the sense it was someone high up in intel that decided to pull the plug on it.