U.S. government takes 10% stake in Intel

Good. It's very much a "Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made a Great Point" situation.

If Taiwan's NDF has ownership share in TSMC and UMC, China's CICIIF in SMIC, Japan's Master Trust in a majority of enterprises, and Abu Dhabi's Mubadala in GlobalFoundries, then we should as well.

The recent (50ish years) aversion to Industrial Policy in America has been pigheaded and ideological to a certain extent. If we wish to build capacity domestically, especially in high capex and low margins industry, some amount of government support is needed.

Funds that are overwhelmingly sourced via private capital cannot take the same risks to build an ecosystem that a Soverign Development Fund can. This is what the Master Trust (Japan), NDF (Taiwan), and Temasek (Singapore) did to build their own domestic industries in semiconductors and REE processing - industries with high capex, high IP barriers, and low margins.

This now sets the precedent to develop at sovereign development fund.

If we did this with GM and Solyndra a decade+ ago we would have been in a better position to protect our automotive and renewable industry, but ofc the GOP of that era along with a portion of the DNC was not ready to take such a risk.

The CHIPS and IRA acts were steps in the right direction, but couldn't really take full advantage of the stick.

Edit: Surprised that a forum that largely supports single payer healthcare opposes sovereign development funds, even though they themselves could help enforce pricing in a less complex manner than that which the CMS does today.

At some point this is just reflexive hatred.

The government support should have come in the form of a real competitor. Intel got this way because they had no competition - nobody thought a domestic EULV manufacturer would be an American prerogative in 20 years. All the customers for dense silicon were fine importing it from Taiwan.

Pouring more money into a proven dumpster fire won't put out the fire. This is the protectionist just-desert of refusing to regulate the top-dog competitors into a position where they're afraid to rest on their laurels. If we want an American lithography powerhouse, buying Intel stock rewards exactly the wrong incentives.

So tell me your plan that would create a competitor for Intel from scratch that could be making decent chips in 5 years? 10 years?

Given the circumstances and the relatively low dollars involved, it would be interesting to see the experiment: $10B darpa program to establish a scalable fab ecosystem in 5 years via consortium.

This was how the internet was created, darpa stitched together dozens of performers to get the key ingredients (eg bbn gateways, academic subnets, experimental applications, protocol research.

They even led the last ditch marketing Hail Mary after years of no-one caring about the program besides the zillions of engineers from all around building it by organizing a press day in a hotel ballroom for a demo day.

As a taxpayer I’d strongly support 5B/.1% of the fed budget for a few years just to learn what happens in the attempt.