, the director of the strategic technologies program at CSIS, sees events unfolding roughly the same way. “One of the big effects will be to see more plants, more chip production capability, built in the US,” he notes. “This will strengthen the chip industrial base in the US.”, a managing director and senior equity analyst with Wedbush Securities, argues that it’s the latter. “It’s a small step in what’s going to be a marathon for the US, to even make a dent,” he says.
But, he notes that even seeing a “5 to 7 percent of chip production move out Asia would be a Herculean success for the US.”Of course, a figure measured in the billions of dollars is a vast sum of money, but in the chip landscape, that doesn’t go very far, says Yoffie. “The kind of money we’re talking about here is actually relatively small,” he adds. Making a “state of the art” facility to fabricate the wafers for semiconductors costs anywhere from about $10 billion to $20 billion.
Plus, the equipment involved in the fabrication process can come with a sticker price of around $150 million for just one machine. If it all sounds complex, that’s because it is. “It’s the most complicated manufacturing product that exists in the world today,” Yoffie says. “There’s nothing more complicated than semiconductors.”
Lewis, of CSIS, says the investment was necessary. “We needed to do this,” he says. “And on chips, we needed to do it probably a decade ago.”“The primary reason was the pandemic,” Yoffie says, “which produced a shift between people consuming fewer services and more goods—so we saw a boom in demand for physical products, and many of those physical products required semiconductors, whether we’re talking about computers or whether we’re talking about cars.
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Source: Nature - 🏆 64. / 68 Read more »