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

(www.reuters.com)
437 points adventured | 2 comments | 15 May 21 00:49 UTC | HN request time: 0.459s | source
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_the_inflator ◴[15 May 21 06:00 UTC] No.27162817[source]▶
"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?

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schmorptron ◴[15 May 21 06:48 UTC] No.27163018[source]▶
Yep. This is sooo frustrating. Why does Europe, and Germany especially, just NOT grasp digitalization at all? I'm growing ever more angry that almost our politicians are 80 year old mega-boomers who are voted in by other boomers and couldn't care less about any interests other than their own. Young people and their climate & computors be damned.
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croes ◴[15 May 21 07:04 UTC] No.27163081[source]▶
It's a little bit more complicated. TSMC wants subvention for building the fabs, but the chips that will be produced will be sold elsewhere. So the EU gains nothing from it but costs. The EU needs a european chip manufacturer and developer not a subsidiary of Intel or TSMC
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christkv ◴[15 May 21 07:14 UTC] No.27163138[source]▶
Guess what by putting a factory doing the newest node you educate a whole new generation of engineers that can build and run those next fabs.
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pas ◴[15 May 21 11:13 UTC] No.27164209[source]▶
TSMC buys their next gen stuff from ASML (Netherlands), so the problem is not knowledge transfer, it's good old manufacturing and scaling up. (And that means labor, and traditionally labor laws in the Members States meant that offshoring large scale production was the smart choice ... strategic importance or not, if it doesn't make sense economically and business-wise, then that means it'll be instantly worthless strategically too.)
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1. lttlrck ◴[15 May 21 17:19 UTC] No.27167045[source]▶
The buy a tool from ASML. TSMC built up the knowledge to use that tool, to achieve these processes, themselves.

Knowledge transfer is key.

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2. pas ◴[17 May 21 14:48 UTC] No.27184066[source]▶
I'd say the working relationship is the important thing. (yaay, synergy!)

Naturally TSMC knows their tools and processes, works with product companies (nvidia, AMD, Qualcomm) to actually implement their design on the target process node. And at the same time works with the various tool vendors to refine the process, the tools themselves. But as lately we saw it's increasingly impossible to do it "alone", both Intel and Samsung works with many-many vendors. (Intel - among others - funded the push for EUV by buying ASML equity in 2012.)