U.S. government takes 10% stake in Intel

There is only 1 winner and 1 loser: Intel.

It's the only chip manufacturer "left" in the US. The argument is national security: the US expects China to invade Taiwan and this will kill TSMC in the process.

Whether this will happen or not can be debated, but this is what the government expects.

> It's the only chip manufacturer "left" in the US

Global Foundries, Micron, and Texas Instruments all come to mind

Texas Instruments and Microchip: Am I a joke to you?

Yeah terrible position to be when your own government is investing in your competitors' company using your own tax dollars.

As a software engineer, this isn't an entirely new concept.

I think all three of those other companies are also getting CHIPS-act subsidies?

I'm surprised to see on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microchip_Technology that Microchip does in fact have fabs. I thought it was fabless! Its fabs are in the US, but the assembly and test facilities are all across the Pacific.

> the US expects China to invade Taiwan and this will kill TSMC in the process.

Would it though? The TSMC foundries are pretty much in every continent. Are they just going to stop operating if this happens? Because that seems akin to killing a golden goose.

Also what is up with Global Foundries? I don’t hear a peep about them.

I suppose it could be worse. Still, now the US has a vested interest in seeing Intel crush AMD and others.

As far as I know none of them manufacture anything resembling a replacement for a Xeon, which is relevant to national security because those are uses in military applications.

Neither of them make high performance CPUs or GPUs

They just need to bribe POTUS, and everything will be fine.

GF hasn't gone past the 12nm node. TI is at 45nm. Micron is on relatively recent processes, but they make RAM, not logic (which are totally different processes). Intel is the only chip manufacturer left that is working in logic at anything like the leading edge.

GF is a few nodes behind. Micron doesn't make semiconductors, they mostly make flash and whatnot. TI doesn't have the capacity or knowledge to expand to Intel's size/capacity

GF is like a decade behind in research. Without years to ramp up and update their fabs they're not relevant.

Global Foundries is on 12nm. TSMC is at 3.

And now China knows the US expects this and it also knows the US does not expect to stop China, so China knows that it can expect the US to do very little. It's game theory turtles all the way down...

Edit: I think it's a misconception that China cares much about fabs in Taiwan. It wants unification.

If the argument was for protecting Intel, then the US government should be placing huge orders with Intel for solutions that will fund R&D and allow the company to regain its position as a foundry. They should be tapping into the defense budget. DARPA should be involved. This was an opportunity for petty extortion and a step towards socialism.

> doesn't make semiconductors, they mostly make flash and whatnot

Um.

All that stuff is still semiconductors, just with different patterns printed on them.

re: Micron - Memory is very different from logic chips. You vast number of repeating cells in memory. If any of them are bad you can just turn them off and bin them as lower capacity. You can do that to some extend with logic chips but not nearly as much as memory.

TSMC gets their machines from ASML who licenses their technology from the Department of Energy. The US will be OK.

Exactly. Expect to see some kind of additional intervention such as forcing a certain number of chips that currently go to TSMC to go to Intel.

It also means that China can expect the destruction of Taiwan's fabs to hurt the US less than China.

Combine that with the US's ability to unilaterally destroy Taiwan's fabs, and it sways the calculation a bit

> TI doesn't have the capacity or knowledge to expand to Intel's size/capacity

I mean, they might if Intel were allowed to fail.

AMD is not a chip manufacturer and what “others”?

And the current administration is unlikely to help Taiwan in the event of said invasion.

If (or when) China invades Taiwan we will be better off than Taiwan but I wouldn't call us "OK" at that point. That will be a major disruption.

It will take decades for the US to get where Taiwan is now in semiconductor manufacturing, if ever. It's not just about building the most advanced chip factory. It's about re-aligning the entire nation's value system and culture to allow such development to happen in the first place.

We complain about the money we spend already. And now we're supposed to subsidize an entire industry to the point where we can build the most complex machines known to civilization at scale in a time-frame that matters to a global conflict that's potentially approaching soon? I don't see it.

This is my thought on it too. I don't think this is meant to be a political win so much as US intelligence views chip manufacturing extremely strategically. I also don't know about what will happen to TSMC. But the US has been pushing for US made GPUs as well. This goes back to Biden's admin as well.

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/us-govt-pushes-nv...

If it was that simple, Intel, Samsung, etc. wouldn't be behind TSMC. There's a lot more to it than just buying an ASML machine.

Right, AMD sold off their foundry business as GlobalFoundries in 02009 to the Mubadala sovereign wealth fund of the UAE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GlobalFoundries

The others would probably be GlobalFoundries, Micron, Microchip, and TI.

This shows me you are not aware of just how much work goes into EUV and beyond besides simply buying the machine.

so.. shouldn't US take stake in TSMC instead?

Probably closer to two decades behind at this point.

Government involvement is the fastest way to corrupt the purpose of an organization, hollow out its soul and quickly get rid of all the competant people. There's a reason that the DOGE findings made a laughing stock of government employees.

I see it different. The loser is the taxpayers. The loser is the market, which is less and less free. When there’s no incentive to run your company correctly… we get another company not run correctly.

How to run a company correctly?

I believe the most modern TSMC fabs outside of Taiwan are in Arizona. They are just moving to 4nm which is nearly 5 years old and just a revision of 5nm which is getting close to 7 years old.

TSMC aims to have N3 in Arizona by 2028 at the earliest which is 6 years after it first released. By that time, TSMC will have released N3X, N2, N2P, N2X, A16, and A14.

TSMC is heavily sponsored by the Taiwanese government and was created with the express purpose of making Taiwan so valuable that the West would be forced to defend them against China. Moving newer processes out of the country is against their national interests and they've made it clear that there's no plan to do that.

What good would that do if China invades Taiwan?

You're right but also wrong. Flash is just semiconductors etched in a different pattern than logic, but you don't print on semiconductors. Semiconductors are 'printed' on wafers via photolithography.

Much more likely that SMIC would, because TI isn't just 15 years behind; it also has the disadvantage of being in the US. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiconductor_industry_in_Chin... for a look at what it looks like where conditions are more favorable.

Intel's wafers are made of silicon, which is a semiconductor. Silicon on sapphire hasn't been widely used for a long time, if that's what you're thinking of. Photolithography prints resists on semiconductor wafers which are then used to pattern the next process step, such as wet etching, plasma etching, oxide growth, epitaxial polysilicon growth, ion implantation, etc. These mostly remove semiconductor from the wafer or alter its properties.

GF is a zombie company. Micron and TI are both far far away from leading edge. There is only one American company which is both developing and manufacturing leading edge nodes.

Huge order for... what? DoD's needs for chips are quite modest in quantity. Truth is that the US Gov doesn't need the volume which requires Intel to keep afloat.

Outside of Taiwan TSMC foundries are just pumping out already developed non leading edge fab processes. Everyone who matters to TSMC tech development is in Taiwan.

"Real men have fabs" (no more, no more).

The linked ppt here has a lot of details: https://fabweb.ece.illinois.edu/

A large bulk of CPU orders comes from Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. Want to say 50% of all AMD revenue is datacenters, and the Hyperscalers represent the largest chunk of that.

> There's a reason that the DOGE findings made a laughing stock of government employees

Can you point out which specific findings? Ideally ones that are substantiated and not just one off tweets.

Interesting, I hadn't known that silicon is itself a semiconductor before all the circuits are added. Am I correct in saying that the etching process transforms a single semiconductor into billions?

> It's about re-aligning the entire nation's value system and culture to allow such development to happen in the first place.

It's taken about 8 years to realign the US from a democracy to a fascist regime, something that was nearly unthinkable. This isn't a hard problem with the right propaganda and manipulation.

Depends on the implementation.

Switzerland owns its energy companies and its public transport company. Hugely successful.

No, silicon is still just one semiconductor, just like water is just one liquid. The substrate is still just one piece of silicon, despite having many silicon semiconductor devices fabricated in it. Polysilicon layers may or may not be additional pieces of silicon.

It is not socialism. Socialism is when the workers control the means of production. Not a fat windbag mobster president and his thugs.

The vast majority of TSMC production is in taiwan. If china invades the fabs will be destroyed. They pretty much would be forced to just stop operating, yes.

Yes but it's easy to go from democracy to fascism. It's harder going the other way. It's like going from a clean house to a messy house is much easier than going from a filthy house to a tidy house.

Quite the opposite. Part of the reason Trump wanted to end the Russia-Ukraine war so bad was because they wanted to gear up for the "big fight". Ukraine simply wasn't a big strategic priority which is why they wanted to either end the war (best case), or shift responsibility over to Europe if that failed.

Lookup Elbridge Colby - served in first Trump admin and now Undersecretary of Defense. Along with Hegseth and JD Vance, they are all that same line of thought

Elaborate a bit more on the last para, please? I know Rubio is a hawk and bannon (who Trump still talks to) wants war

Yes

The Arizona fab has been mostly a letdown so far and it's not even doing e2e manufacturing - all parts get shipped back to Taiwan for final assembly.

Here's Elbridge Colby on a debate about Ukraine and China

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMRYvl2Jefg

Hegseth on China

https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/41... https://edition.cnn.com/2025/03/27/asia/pete-hegseth-asia-to...

I don't think the views of all the "high level strategist" types align precisely. But there are very few true isolationists like Rand Paul in the executive branch

I find it doubtful that the current admin would just let China walk in to Taiwan. Trump doesn't want a war, but he's not going to want to get bent over and make the US look weak either.

And its not all that different from Democratic position, its a bit of "Washington Consensus" type of situation, like anti-Communism was during the Cold War. The approach between admins is slightly different however, and the Trump admin doesn't like Europe all that much.

I see! Thanks for the info.

Happy to help!

This is a very wrong take.

Fabs run on data. It takes years to gather that data.

Fabs can't just be repurposed overnight. Yields must be good, which takes data, equipment, etc which is all extremely specialized.

Very ignorant take.