How America is trying to get back in the microchip business

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Chip supply issues are still giving some of world's biggest companies a major headache
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/02/chip-sho...volvo.html

KEY POINTS: Apple CFO Luca Maestri said supply constraints related to Covid-19 could hurt sales by between $4 billion and $8 billion. Nokia CEO Pekka Lundmark said that the Finnish telco would have grown faster in the last quarter had it not been for supply chain issues. The lockdowns in China are adding to short-term uncertainty, Lundmark said in reference to Nokia's chip supply chain... (MORE - details)

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How America is trying to get back in the microchip business
https://www.vox.com/recode/23048906/chip...rica-biden

INTRO: From afar, the new Wolfspeed factory in upstate New York looks like any other large corporate office building, with an unassuming gray exterior and large glass windows. But hidden inside is a high-tech plant that’s almost entirely operated by a fleet of robots programmed to build semiconductors with a high level of precision. The scene is a far cry from the manual labor of the 20th-century Ford assembly line, and it just might be the future of American manufacturing, at least according to the politicians and executives who celebrated the plant’s grand opening in late April.

To mark the occasion, a few hundred people, including Wolfspeed employees, investors, and local officials, gathered in a large tent just a short walk away from the factory’s entryway. A series of speakers, including Wolfspeed CEO Gregg Lowe, took turns boasting about the plant’s importance - for local jobs, for technology, for fighting climate change, and even for American prosperity.

Also in attendance was Eric Bach, the chief engineer of Lucid Motors, an electric automaker that, just a few hours earlier, announced it would start using Wolfspeed’s chips in its vehicles. The star of the show: New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, who claimed the new facility was part of the “greatest comeback in the history of this nation” before she took a spin in one of the luxury Lucid EVs.

“This has to happen. No longer can the country, the United States, be brought to its knees because of supply chain issues,” Hochul told Recode. “Make them here! Make them in New York! We’ll put the money behind it.”

Wolfspeed’s factory is opening its doors after more than two years of a worldwide semiconductor shortage that left cars without parts and the health care system low on medical devices. To produce more chips, the Biden administration, with the help of state governments, now plans to invest $52 billion in the chip industry to build more factories just like the new plant outside Utica, New York.

The hope is that these plants won’t just make more semiconductors; they’ll spur a tech manufacturing renaissance in the same country that invented the computer chip and produced Silicon Valley decades ago... (MORE - details)

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Re: How America is trying to get back in the microchip business
Will people still buy US made chips when they can buy them more cheaply from (say) China? I think probably not.

[C C]

Re: How America is trying to get back in the microchip business
Will people still buy US made chips when they can buy them more cheaply from (say) China? I think probably not.

This new wave of manufacturing that will be "depopulated" of human employees (via ever more sophisticated robots), would supposedly bring other long-lost assembly industries back to North America, also.

But to fully make the product prices competitive, the Blue States might additionally have to make exemptions for those reborn factories. Reduce the punitive taxes, licenses, property fees, and pro-union mandates directed at anything having the audacity to be wealth-motivated or production-oriented (i.e., business). And lessen predatory expenses resulting from fulfilling elaborate, construction/safety codes. (Would they really need most of those to protect robots? Maybe so, costly machines valued more than replaceable people.)

Tariffs would probably have to be increased, too.

But all that is surely not going to happen (ideological heresy!). Even in Red States, mitigating some of those impediments might still be fantasy; or replaced by alternative problems (like shortages of local tech talent, lack of engineering and semiconductor specialty schools).

Otherwise -- aside from intermittent supply shortages of microchips persisting long into this century (with only brief alleviations) -- Washington would basically have to continually prop-up homeland chip factories, as a kind of "teacher's pet", or the rogue son whose gambling debts are paid by a town's most elite family.

That government favoritism justified by the threat of China eventually annexing Taiwan and quasi-assimilating the free will of any other quality chip sources in Asia through a variety of incremental bullyings, heavy-handed policy tactics, treaties, and contracts. Then China placing embargoes on their sale to the US.