TSMC looks to double down on U.S. chip factories as talks in Europe falter

"European chip and auto companies, for their part, are mostly lined up against the idea. They would prefer subsidies for the older-generation chips that are heavily used by car manufacturers and are in short supply.

Many of TSMC's most lucrative customers, such as Apple, are U.S.-based, while its European customer base is made up of mostly of automakers buying less-advanced chips."

Oh boy... This is exactly why EU will always stay third behind USA, China...

"We don't need e mobility, we have the best combustion engines!" Tesla owns VW now.

"We don't need Apple like chips"

This hurts. Apple and rest does many things differently and way better than EU. We should learn from them.

Or do I miss something?

Other people have called this the greatest strength of Nintendo: build stuff with slightly older parts that are cheap and proven to work, so that you don't have to sell at a loss

That aside, I'm in the process of designing an USB gadget and I find process shrinks quite pesky. Of course it'll reduce production costs for the manufacturer of the IC but it also reduces flanking times which causes more electromagnetic interference issues for me.

So insisting on using large ICs built using old process nodes is a very valid decision if you work in an area where reliability trumps a $0.001 per piece cost saving. Like in cars, robots, or industrial machines.

That said, I see it more and more that German companies outsource all of their production until they eventually have so little building skills left inside their building that innovation stops. It's kind of the same issues that drove Boing to recycle old designs, but in Europe it's happening with thousands of small companies, instead of one big one.

Except Nintendo's strength and main selling ponit was never their hardware, but their vast entertainment IP roster(Super Mario, etc.) which they go to great lengths to enforce its protection. So it's not a good comparison to products who's performance is dependent on being on the latest tech nodes.