WRT to lack of a skilled workforce, here is an interesting anecdote. I remember back in the late 90's, Intel had to fire most line workers in their FABS, and hire people with Ph.D.'s in solid-state physics.
I actually knew one of these people who were fired: She was our housecleaner. And--like the supper-smart garbage man of the Dilbert Cartoons, she was very smart. Smarter than me. I know because she helped me solve some problems I couldn't solve on my own.
Why was she cleaning houses? Tragic story. No doubt she could have gotten a Ph.D., but she was older, had some health problems which wouldn't let her work 60-80 hours a week. And she was black, perhaps discrimination was a factor too.
I'd hate to even think of how smart you have to be to work in FABs today, but let me tell you, not even $8.5 billion is going to create more of these people. Best you can hope for is you can pay them enough to get them to work for you.
It wasn't just intel, it was every semi-conductor manufacturer in the valley (hence the inability to find other work).
They closed because it was cheaper to build in other countries, or to outsource from contractors who build in other countries (where organized labor doesn't exist). The U.S. lost thousands of high-paying (and tax-paying) labor positions and atrophied the skills that went with them. Intel profited from it.
These people were disproportionately minorities, disproportionately well-represented by unions, and had made a lot of progress in improving their working conditions re: use of terribly corrosive chemicals. All of that backslid when labor went off-shore.
Now, the taxpayer has to pay Intel $8.5B to bring back manufacturing capacity to the U.S.; nice job, if you can get it. It'll be really interesting to see who takes these jobs, and how quickly we can rebuild the muscles that Intel shareholders profited from decomposing.
Honestly it blows my mind they were able to give control of one of the most important industries in the world over to a foreign country like that.
The engines of capitalism only look 1 quarter ahead. And the politicians who support them only look up to the next election. Unless you are majority or largely controlled by your founders, who care about building a good legacy.
Exactly. It's why authoritarian and/or single-party nations have so much more potential to succeed. It's why China did so well for a while. However, in practice, as we've seen with China and others, authoritarianism only works well when the people at the top are really smart and don't have some major character flaws (i.e., the "benevolent dictator"). Eventually, you get a dictator who's a narcissist or moron or fruitcake and it all falls apart. In that case, the best case is that the inner circle will murder him in his bathtub and select a better leader before he ruins everything.
Benevolent dictator is still just a dictator. As he grows older, he cares more about staying in power than following current trends. China wanted to prevent this with their 10 year rule for the general secretary but Xi changfed that and that was his biggest mistake. Democracy's weakness (politicians focusing just on next election cycle) is also its biggest strength. It allows change and adaptation.
You cannot have a dictator who is not a "narcissist or moron or fruitcake" - this is not how human mind works.
Seems to have worked for Russia.
Sounds like there is a market opportunity for long term disrupters. We are seeing it on the high end (SpaceX, Tesla) and on the low end a bit (Origin USA). Maybe if you can examine each industry infected by MBAs and see which ones have had enough quality fade caused by their rot to maybe disrupt?
Market investment is ultimately determined by plausible narrative, and by the national narratives at the broadest level.
That is, if your industry is tuned in to the investment climate, the things being pursued match the things that people are saying "will make the country great", and are backed up by legislation and financing deals.
In the previous era, the US was focused on a deindustrializing narrative: the things that made America great were "clean, high-tech" industry, high graduation rates and four-year degrees, and an outsourced empire that brought sprawling supply chains together "just in time".
The new model has brought back the industry, so it needs an emphasis on concrete job skills, versus academic credentialing. It's in-sourced so the supply chain has started in on a radical shift. It emphasizes new energy sources with few foreign dependencies, moving the geopolitical stance towards isolation. The approach to the national balance sheet also has to change, but precisely how lacks for consensus.
Like with the previous shifts there were some reasons to take the narrative in a certain direction: late 60's America had many environmental concerns, and fell into an energy crunch in the next decade. "Smart bombing" the Middle East to secure oil supplies brought together the national industries towards a common goal, and the money supply got a reset early on with the end of Bretton-Woods, that helped propel the Boomer generation towards homes-and-families participation within the system.
Today we're still putting together the pieces of that narrative, but it's central to the political climate: the old two-party system is focused on exhausted narratives that don't actually excite ordinary people to vote. Therefore the candidates are rushing to put together platforms that rewrite the script and mobilize new demographics.
As opposed to what, something like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_campaign?
That’s the power of slave labour. Global economy is really modern day slavery. When you are making trillions in USD in the USA, paying someone in china $2 a day would’ve been an Egyptian pharaohs dream.
Calling it slave labour is an insult to the people who had to live with actual slavery.
The people who flagged this comment must believe that someone working at McDonald's for low wages is the same as someone being held as property, their family members terrorized, raped, beaten, whipped, murdered, etc. at the whim of their legal owners.
Yup nowadays we import the product not the slaves.
I think you may be undermining what slavery was .
I have met folks who work in workshops in India that export stuff to USA and other developed nations. Those workers make a whole lot more money than their neighbors who produce for the domestic market and they have better working conditions. Their overall quality of life, while nowhere close to G8 standards, is so much better. And their community benefits from their increased wages.
Those "slaves" have generally become quite wealthy. The median wage in Taiwan is close to the UK (it has been higher in the past), and China has moved out of poverty and steadily improving which is a pretty reasonable proxy for all of Asia (India has some catching up to do, but they'll get there).
This is the same tired argument that was made when the US pushed these jobs off the continent - if the very low wage jobs are allowed exist; eventually enough wealth will be generated that nobody needs to do them. Those sweatshops are in fact a path to prosperity. In some sense it is a cosmic win that all the capital was developed in Asia because they needed it more, but that probably wasn't the sort of charity that policymakers intended at the time.
Calling Taiwanese semiconductor workers “slave labor” may be the funniest take I’ve seen all week. Have you been to Taiwan??
i find this rise in nativistic and jingoistic sentiment weird. comparative advantage exists for a reason - we are not going to be the best at every single step of every single industry.
This is common sense and has nothing to do with nativism or jingoism. The offshoring was an action of pure selfish greed at the expense of the working class people who built the industry.
There are more considerations than just profits. Consider how domestic PPE plants closed down in the US because even US gov institutions wanted the cheapest product, and went overseas. Then when COVID hit, we had no local supplier for PPE.
It's amazing to me the number of people ranting at each other about this, when it seems like straight up BS. Intel's current and past manufacturing sites are not in low cost of living locations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_manufacturing_si... There are two exceptions: one in China, one in Malaysia, but that is two out of dozens in the US/EU/Israel.
And even then, Malaysia has a bigger GDP PPP per capita than Chile, Bulgaria, Uruguay, and only slightly behind Greece! Quite a bit above Mexico too! They aren't a low-cost country.
Brain drain is a bitch
TSMC is paying around $23/hour to manufacturing technicians in Arizona. They’re also sending people to Taiwan to get trained and apparently it’s brutal enough that most people drop out of the program.
Asianometry did a video on this recently: https://youtu.be/Nk-lBok9_TU
You can do better than that flinging burgers at Dicks here in Seattle.
That’s wild. For something that requires a trip to Taiwan for training, which I imagine makes it not an easy job, why does it pay so little? I’d think retention would be important if the training is that intensive.
It's because in Taiwan that's standard compensation for this field, and for that specific project it's TSMC. They don't want to pay US rates if they can avoid it, and it's possible that their company would be unprofitable if they had to.
Ha, ha, ha. No.
Let's see, from Wikipedia. 2022 data:
- Number of employees: 73,090
- Net income: US$27.67 billion
Which gives us: 27.67e9/73090 = 369,407.57
So, just looking at their net income (which already takes into account the salary costs of said employees), they could afford to pay every employee US $370,000 a year before being unprofitable.
Between US $50,000 and US $370,000 there is quite some margin for improvement. And clearly, the low wages they pay have nothing to do with the risk of being unprofitable.
Semiconductor manufacturing is very capital intensive so running the company as a nonprofit is a nonstarter.
You've presented historical data to counter the of argument that wage/salary growth MAY lead to potential unprofitability solely on the basis of one year's profit numbers. That's literally driving forward looking in the rearview mirror because it says very little about how profitable the company would be if it raised wages/salaries. At best it may be a first order approximation of how profitable the company would have been in 2022, if it paid people more then. However, even for 2022 the calculation isn't as simple as dividing the profit by the number of employees and keeping the company profitable.
Hiding behind "it's complicated" is an over-used excuse to avoid a more critical look at a problem.
A one year point is a crude approximation, but it does illustrate the order of magnitude mismatch between what they could pay their employees vs what they actually pay them, which was the short point being made.
More broadly, TSMC had no problem shelling out $9.9 billion to shareholders that same year (or $123,000+ per employee). So the argument of saving every penny because of the "capital intensive" nature of their business is also out the door.
And complaining about a single year estimate in the case of TSMC is barking up the wrong tree. They've had net incomes in the billions at least since the beginning of the 2000s.
So no, in the case of TSMC, they have no reason to pay wages below what is considered a "living wage" in Phoenix, Arizona.
https://livingwage.mit.edu/metros/38060
Then TSMC would be paying its Taiwan employees a lot less, the disparity could be a problem somehow.
Our markets, not even remotely isolated to semiconductor, are saturated in these bloated old businesses that are running on the razor's edge of financial ruin, yet every quarter are paying out catastrophic amounts of money in stock buybacks and generous compensation packages for the executives running them into the ground. It's beyond fucking parody at this point.
Also I wonder what the excuses will be once all the underdeveloped nations do what China did and actually develop. We have a finite number of exploitable countries on the planet with workers willing to work for pennies to assemble products. At SOME POINT this party is going to end, it has to.
Ok then perhaps offer a better approximation, let's say 50% of profit instead of the 100% share. That is still a very decent wage and is on top of the existing labour expense which profit has already accounted for
Problems with that are things like:
- what if the EU writes a rule and then fines you for breaking it as a percentage of revenue? You can't have no money available for the future. You need a huge amount of money available for the future, as otherwise a company that pays its workers less (but still retains them) will beat you eventually
- why would anyone invest in you for the chance of no return? It's a high risk strategy to put $1m on a number in roulette for the chance of making a fortune; it's a ridiculous one to put $1m on a number in roulette for the chance of getting your money back
Companies have absolutely non incentive to do this. TMSC turned that profit in 2022 with wages as-is, why would they spend more on wages if they don't need to?
Don't get me wrong, I wish companies were incentivized to do right by their employees. That's just not how the world works, companies only need to do the bare minimum to get the job done and leave as much profit on the table as possible.
Very capital intensive means operating costs (wages) are a small percentage.
A trailing fab has very few people running the operation. This will be a trailing fab.
i've done better than $23/h making pizza
I just hope you don't loose your love for pizza.
Or lose your pizza making wages to wafer makers applying their wafer making skills to pizza making.
they already have that, it's called dominoes. there's still a market for tattooed freaks with culinary opinions throwing dough and poking a fire with a stick
my love for pizza is surprisingly resilient, and the job was athletic enough to generate a healthy appetite.
but yeah, most of my coworkers had a hard time doing it sober
You may not have been making pizza where the $23/hr employees were spending their money.
Plus, they can only eat so much pizza. Having more of them switching to pizza making would not necessarily raise their wages, i.e. a glut of pizza makers should depress pizza making wages.
Yikes. I think my local Dunkin’ Donuts is paying $16+.
As a tangential point of comparison $23 per hour is a common rate for nannies/baby sitters in Atlanta Georgia without a degree or development certificate. One we use is a former teacher who disliked the work.
I wonder how the much the pass rate might improve if pay were higher.
The tax payer had nothing to do with it. This is yet another example of the government taking our money (or borrowing our future money) and spending it in ways that we never agreed to and had no input on.
You don't vote in local, congressional, and presidential elections?
If this is Biden's initiative, then the alternative is Trump? I'm sure there could be a technocratic rational non-idealogical third party that would get a bunch of HN voters but does any viable third party actually exist?
Fixing our education system is a lot bigger problem then we've ever been able to tackle as a country by popular initiatives.
The fact that Trump and Biden are the two candidates we've been offered is a sign of a much more fundamental, and disappointing, problem.
I don't think anyone would agree that those two are the best candidates this country has to offer, and most people I've talked to about the election feel stuck picking between which one is less bad.
Find me a candidate that had any input on this Intel investment that campaigned on giving billions to Intel to onshore chip manufacturing.
Maybe they do exist, but I don't remember it coming up.
Also to clarify, local elections wouldn't have helped here. Congressional and presidential elections are a different beast, The Machine (reference to the University of Alabama) heavily influences elections and elected officials. I do vote, but I have little faith that such a massive and heavily funded political system allows my vote to count for more than winning a seat. I've been regularly disappointed by those I've voted for when they inevitably ignore or break promises they campaigned on and make decisions that often fly in the face of the very principles they originally claimed to stand for.
You sound like you’re agreeing with the statement. What is your syntactic point here? That the taxpayer has nothing to do with the decision making is irrelevant the point you responded to. They still pay for it.
Technically we haven't paid for new spending in tax dollars since Clinton was in the White House, its hard to say taxes pay for something when its paid for with debt.
That said, my point was that the tax payer isn't really paying for it when the tax payer has no say in what is being paid for. If the taxes are collected either under false pretense, or no pretense at all, for what the money will be spent on then the citizen is only responsible for paying the tax bill. The money is the government's at that point, and responsibility for how it is spent at that point stops at their desks.
If the tax payer were truly the one paying for this, we would at minimum have a voice in the program. At best, the government would propose the plan and leave it up to the tax payers to fund it in almost a kick starter type of approach. A simple vote would make more sense IMO, but if we are to pay for it with tax dollars and the government refuses to run a surplus, tax payers (should) have to kick in more money to pay for it.
How long until all those new workers are laid off again as intel goes back to overseas fabs?
Add the numbers get bigger and the risks increase, the number of "cheap labor" countries where investments in large tech infrastructure are safe is shrinking every year. Maybe South America? Intel has (had?) a fab in Costa Rica...
South America is very underrated. People still think about the region in 20-30 year old stereotypes, but most countries have gotten much more stable, economics have improved drastically. Workforce is highly educated, different countries share a very similar culture and mostly speak the same language, which means that a lot of things can be scaled much easier. Of course, there's also Portuguese, which is still somewhat similar, and Quechuan languages speakers who learn Spanish as a second language, but this doesn't change the equation much.
The only thing the region lacks is investment and ecosystem to attract and protect it.
Venezuela's perpetual political/economic fuck-ups (going on 125 years at this point? [0]), Argentina's recurring currency fuck-ups, some really nasty left-wing vs right-wing spats between countries, and a generally weak rule of law / judiciary (in comparison with executive branches) deserve mentioning too.
South America could stand to learn a LOT from ASEAN -- stability = international investment = economic growth = happy people = stability.
In contrast, in South America inveterate bickering about politics dominates and you end up with something like this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Supranational_Ameri...
I hope it sorts itself out! And I know Columbia and Brazil are developing some impressive technical industries, especially since they share North America timezones. But it should be honest about the headwinds.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venezuelan_crisis_(disambigu...
The problem is that the “stability” and invesment interventions from the USA has typically come with some rather unpleasant strings attached. I think it’s either patronising or ignorant to suggest that various Latin American countries policy decisions weren’t made with that in mind.
It doesn't have to be US investment!
It's wasn't just the semi-conductor manufacturers either.
The PRC had the supply chain from the bottom up (to some extent funded by the western consumers and corporations), whereas the US is trying to get reindustrializd from the top down, without first building a solid fundamental. To make the tough jobs easy, you must have the easy jobs done well first.
Exactly. That's why this has everything to go wrong. You cannot create the talent and the supply chain needed for this with $8B. The US needs to solve much more fundamental things like their schools and the local supply chain to even have a shot of creating a successful chip business again.
Recall, it takes years to build these fabs. Fortunately, people will be more likely to spend years in grad school training for these jobs, if they know that when they graduate there will be fabs to hire them.
Rebuilding is a chicken and egg problem, but it’s not as hard as defeating the axis powers in WWII. If this country has the Will to do something, it’s gunna get done.
This is harder than defeating an enemy militarily. Defeating someone militarily is relatively simple to do; and every country figures it out from necessity. It is an expensive process, but ultimately mainly about deciding that the high price is worth it (and if the country can afford it/has the industrial base to sustain the effort, but neither of those things can be changed in a conflict).
Building a profitable industrial chain is significantly harder to do and much rarer to achieve. The US certainly has the people to do it, but it isn't clear that the political trade-offs will be acceptable.
This doesn't make sense, Intel did and still does most of its manufacturing in the US, didn't it? (See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_manufacturing_si...) I assume the thing that changed if there was a major loss of jobs was automation, not outsourcing. It's a lot easier to keep a clean room clean if you don't need to let people (with their hair and dead skin particles) in.
Their DoD and Dod-adjacent business (read: high-nanometer) processes are largely in the U.S.
Their consumer and server business (read: low-nm) processes are largely international.
The wikipedia page you linked evinces this statement.
The phrase "most of its manufacturing" is a Simpson's Paradox statement. It's true, but not in a way that's interesting. High-nanometer processes are easier to automate.
All of the "low-nm" process fabs on that wiki page are in the US (with one in Ireland).
I went down a bit of a rabbit hole to try and find manufacturing stats per fab, and it's pretty difficult to find.
First, it's worth noting that most of the <300nm fabs in the U.S. are really new. The Oregon facility was historically the most relevant fab, Arizona seems to be (potentially?) supplanting it from a design and capacity POV.
But the Israeli fab really shouldn't be discounted, they employ 12k people in Israel. I can't find numbers on production output, but that headcount is a similar OOM to the Oregon plant. Most of their successful, recent designs came from Israel, too.
As I understand it from said rabbit hole, they do a lot of design and "proofing" manufacturing of low-nm processes in Oregon, but rely on Ireland and Israel to scale-up.
It seems that the recent (i.e. post-9/11) Arizona plants are more geared towards high-volume production. Regardless of what calculations went into those decisions, they're a hedge against political instability in Israel.
How about asking the workers in other countries who benefitted from this transaction if they were happy with the arrangement? Or do only Americans matter? Maybe you think foreigners are fit only to till dirt fields as subsistence farmers?
I'm sure they were happy with the arrangement, they benefitted from it in the short-term. You should speak with Foxconn workers today, though. The story is more nuanced.
This is a weird claim to bestow on my original post.
Labor conditions matter. The balance of power of power and profits between labor and capital matters.
I promise you, semiconductors did not move production to ${foreign_country} out of the goodness of their hearts, to better the living conditions of ${foreign_country}'s impoverished underclasses.
They did it because the balance of power (and profits) had shifted towards labor in this country in the 40s, 50s and 60s, and the population of ${foreign_country} was cheaper to exploit.
It's also worth pointing out (again) that a disproportionate of people in manufacturing in California semiconductor industry were 0th or 1st generation immigrants (from the Philippines, Mexico, China and so on) or internal refugees from the Jim Crow South who migrated to California for military work during WW II. These were people who were literally at most 1 generation removed from subsistence farming.
Again, a weird claim to stick me with.
Humans working in manufacturing should be free to negotiate living wages, safe and healthy working conditions, reasonable time off and retirement policies, illness/disability insurance, and so on.
The reason U.S. companies prefer "foreigners" (domestically and abroad) is not because foreigners don't deserve these things as much as any other person, it's because they know they can get away with exploiting them for a few decades before they develop class consciousness.
In the last few years, workers in China have been striking to demand what workers in California fought hard for 70-80 years ago.
Entirely coincidentally, Foxconn began "diversifying" its manufacturing capacity into India and other countries. Do you think it's because they want to help uplift people from subsistence farming? :)
In many of the countries with cheap labor the ones who profit the most are not the workers as you try to imagine this nice idea )))
There's a certain irony in the point being made by that person because they think it means organized labor is good, and lack of it is cheap and bad.
Those workers could get the job done just the same without the overhead of labor unions, and this person still thinks that the 'cheapness' means that organized labor is magically better.
You won't get an earnest answer though. Perhaps some nonsense about how these workers would be even better off with organized labor (until their jobs move to the next, cheaper bidder, of course).
This award isn't about innovation, the best way to do things, or job requirements.
This about supply chain security and national defense. So many of our components are made overseas and under governments who are not close allies. This is in order to operate things in our country.
When you have the FABs in the US and under US control you can handle international foreign policy and the security of the nation differently.
Fair enough. But then the question is: How did this happen in the first place? If the Pentagon is playing out scenerio after scenerio after scenerio, how did we allow ourselves to be so embarrassingly venerable?
And now the taxpayer is on the hook for $8.5B and growing?
There's a certain smell to all this.
By not pursuing protectionist public policies.
$8.5B is a big price tag, but whether the government should spend it or not depends on whether or not the investment pays off.
This is way bigger than trade policies. Intel was the world leader in chip-making until fairly recently. Steve Jobs wanted them to build the iPhone chips because they were a generation or two ahead of any other fab in the world. Today, Intel is no longer leading the world in chip fab process.
Intel at the time wasn't interested in fabing ARM chips, and the rest is history.
Intel and American fabs fell behind for a number of reasons. Some of it is tied to our education system and the kinds of people we are training. Some of it is probably related to Intel turning their nose up at the iPhone chip making, losing billions upon billions of money they could have put into R&D. Some of it is a story of American corporate culture not innovating enough.
Fun fact, in the late 90's, Intel was the biggest manufacturer of ARM chips. I was there at the time, and I wrote lots of software to aid in their design.
What happened to Intel was twofold: The first problem was that Robert Noyce, Andy Grove, And Gordon Moore died. Each one was a once-in-century intellect, and it took Intel a while to be able to find somebody who could remotely fill those shoes.
The second problem was Intel was making so much money on x86 chips, that dedicating any fab capacity to anything else--including chips for Apple's iPhone, would for years have had such a huge opportunity cost, that the shareholders would have sued, and with cause. Because literally (not metaphorically) anything they would have manufactured instead would have had a drastically lower profit margin, and the stock would have tanked.
I suspect that the only reason Intel made a foray into ARM chips in the first place was to head off anti-trust accusations, and once the political heat was off, they dropped them like they were hot.
By the time the market shifted, almost a generation of mediocre management had left Intel less paranoid, and therefore, less likely to survive.
It seems that what happened to Intel was a lot worse than just missing Andy Grove's paranoia...
- They missed the mobile market
- They missed the gaming market
- They missed the AI/ML market
- They got multiple generations behind TSMC and Samsung in the fab business
- They lost a whole bunch of market share to AMD, including datacenter
The NY Times article is paywalled, so I can't read it, but I have to wonder what kind of fabs they are meant to be building for our (taxpayers) $8.5B ? I wouldn't have any faith in them building a SOTA fab at this point.
Actually, Intel has been consistent with their specialized CPU DNN libraries and whatnot for years. MKL and the likes are pervasive in modern deep learning stacks. Pretty sure they've captured as much of the AI/ML business as CPUs possibly can.
Also, by gaming do you mean gaming consoles or gaming PCs? Because Intel is popular in gaming PCs also.
Which is exactly how they missed out on AI/ML. CPU is irrelevant in that market.
All gaming consoles use AMD or Nvidia hardware.
Gaming PCs use AMD or Nvidia GPUs.
Any Steam hardware survey (the most relevant for gaming PC contexts) will show Intel handily beating AMD at around 66% to 33% for CPU[1], so your claim that Intel is somehow not popular is bunk.
[1]: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/processormfg/
GPU
Note the "G" followed by PU
Graphics Processing Unit
None of those are GPUs
Steam survey PC video card stats show 76.92% Nvidia, 15.09% AMD, and 7.59% Intel (graphics unit integrated with CPU)
I never said that Intel CPUs are not popular on gaming PCs. But Intel used to have 99% of that Market.
Intel doesn't have and has never had a GPU line worth writing home about, so I don't know why you would bring up something Intel never had to say Intel is unpopular in gaming PCs.
That is my point. Emphasizing the earlier statement: "They missed the gaming market".
Your point is bad. Ignoring the fact that Intel's bread and butter is the CPU, of which they have a dominant gaming marketshare, is obtuse.
They missed the GPU market (AI/ML/Gaming) and the console market. Hence they lost all of that to Nvidia and AMD. Both of those companies now have a bigger market cap than Intel.
How is this so difficult to understand? It is very simple, not obtuse, unless you are autistic.
Nvidia market cap is $2.26 Trillion.
AMD market cap is $290 Billion.
Intel market cap is $178 Billion.
AMD and Nvidia used to be a tiny fraction of Intel.
You guys are getting autistically stuck on this irrelevant detail about CPU popularity in gaming PCs and missing the bigger topic of the discussion. But even in that niche, Intel has lost significant market share to AMD.
Sure, but those are CPU libraries, but what has grown NVIDIA into a $2T company wasn't building CPUs - it was building processors specific to this new and exploding field of ML/AI, which grew out of them building processors (GPUs) specific to the growing field of realtime PC-based gaming...
Is the problem that Intel saw themselves too narrowly as in the CPU business rather than as in the compute business? I've no idea - it'd be interesting to hear the inside story of how all these missed opportunities went down.
I mean, if your benchmark is "not being as successful as NVIDIA", then yes, a lot of companies are failures.
When you connect those dots this feels more like a pseudo bailout in disguise.
Oh, its not a pseudo bailout. It's a bailout full stop. Doesn't mean its a bad idea.
This is exactly what it is. With the added issue that, in all likelihood, $8B is not even enough to start making a change. The US gov would have a better time giving these $8B to startup companies in the chip space. Intel will just squander this money and give some of it to shareholders.
You are forgetting two things:
1. All those happened after Andy Grove's time.
2. And when Andy Grove was at the helm, Intel did not miss opportunities like that. E.g. when Intel's memory chip business started losing market share to the Japanese (who were at the time a low-wage country), they were able to transition to CPUs in time.
Yeah, but what I meant is that these can't all be explained by not being paranoid (letting the competition creep up on you), or even by not having an exceptional CEO.
If you are in the business of making CPUs, and obviously aware of how fast things move in the tech world, then how can you not be aware of industry trends going on like smart phones, gaming and AI? If you are somehow late to see the trend then double down and catch up. What about getting behind on process nodes/generations? This used to be one of Intel's core strengths, and you'd have thought they'd have institutionalized the things you do and don't take on in a new process to keep the change manageable.
So, I wouldn't say it just a matter of not having Andy Grove - it seems like a matter of having incompetence at many levels.
It's also interesting that Intel made some specific bad technical choices.
(ie, not investing in EUV, assuming SAQP would work forever, ignoring the consequences of everything being power-limited...)
This kind of decision is hard, because it's a technical-economic tradeoff, and the latter is more voodoo than math. And that's not even addressing whether you get surprised by things like the LLM boom...
You say:
That's like saying Saudi Arabia made some bad policy decisions. If you are in Saudi Arabia, nothing has a higher return on investment than petroleum. If you invest in anything else, you are leaving money---A LOT of money--on the table.
The result is that capital is drained out of any other business, and the country gets so dependent on just one industry that when the oil runs out, it is a major crisis.
Put yourself in the place of an Intel CEO. You've just invested $4 Billion in a fab. People will by absolutely every single x86 chip that fab will make ~$40 billion over the course of the technology node's life time.
Or, you could make chips for the iPhone, which maybe, perhaps would be a hit? And even if Apple's wildest projections come true, you'll make $8 billion instead of $40 billion, because Apple is not going to pay for Intel to pocket a 90% profit margin, when it could just go to TSMC.
So you are a CEO, and wondering how on the next earnings call you are going to justify turning an asset worth $40 Billion into one worth $8 billion....
Was it not possible to build two fabs and make $48 billion?
What would you do? Build two fabs and make $48 billion, or build two fabs and make $80 billion?
It might be hard to remember now, but Intel was in the position NVIDIA is today: they could sell absolutely every x86 processor they could make, at pretty much any price they cared to name.
So even if Intel could have built another fab (which, btw, it couldn't, the world only graduates so many solid-state physics Ph.D.'s per year) but even if they could, they would STILL have used it to make x86 chips. Literally (not metaphorically or hyperbolically) nothing else they could manufacture would have as high a return on investment as making x86 chips did.
I don’t buy this completely. AMD’s 64-bit humiliation of Intel wasn’t that far in the past, and they knew GPUs were important. They could have hedged their bets a bit more on the basis of sound business management without incurring shareholder wrath.
Good thing we aren’t even slightly close to ever running out.
I've been considering the Intel issue (had family there) and the other post in the thread mention the decade of misses.
This actually seems like one of the most reasonable rationales that I don't hear mentioned very often. You might want to do something, yet your hands our tied, because the investors will sue for poor leadership.
It is the classic innovator's dilemma. There are ton of incentives to keep the focus on today's cash cow in any business.
I don't think it was that Intel didn't have enough capacity to manufacture more. Intel was a manufacturing-first company that beat out "high end" and specialized competitors by economies of scale. Over the long term, the strategy was to build as much high performance silicon as possible.
The problem looks like they went down the typical dinosaurification route that their vanquished high end competitors the likes of DEC, Sun, HP, SGI, IBM, etc., which was to switch from manufacturing as much as possible, to protecting high margin x86 parts. Their x86 PC and server organization out-muscled their manufacturing organization (either that or finance did), and so the ended up being very reluctant to adopt GPGPUs or ARM mobile because those were a threat to x86. By the time they realized they'd missed the boat in those markets, they put out these ridiculous x86 mobile cores and x86 GPGPUs that were costly failures.
This pattern of protecting profit margins on high end products while fixed costs every generation increase and performance increases so low end grows up and erodes high end, causing further retreat and protectionism, is exactly what happened with those aforementioned big iron companies. When the bean counters look at the state of things without an understanding of the technology trends, that's the logical thing to do, but they paint themselves into this corner.
Intel might have just been saved by the bell with Dennard scaling breaking down around the time they were losing their manufacturing advantage. That meant that instead of competitors on a generation or two process lead wiping the floor with them as they did to the minicomputers, it was a much smaller disadvantage and they've been able to somewhat hold on.
That's my non-insider take on it anyway.
I was a physics student who took a nanofab class, fell in love, and desperately wanted to go down this path... until I learned about how complete and utter dogshit the wages were. I kept in touch with two classmates who stuck with it a bit longer. The free market had to beat them over the head a bit longer to get them to let go, but it eventually succeeded. Intel was absolutely printing money for investors the whole time, of course, and now that the material consequences of their poor management have come home to roost they are getting bailouts. Yay, capitalism!
Our education system over-produces qualified scientists, but if semiconductors are a road to not having a house or family and if it pays 5x better to sell ads or stocks... you get what you pay for.
I hope this has changed but I wouldn't bet on it.
to your point, right around the time of the iPhone (roughly)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XScale#Sale_of_PXA_processor_l...
The same with auto manufacturing: lack of real competition bred complacency and then real competition came along.
Perhaps. But the more likely correct answer is: The MIC doesn't make chips. They couldn't and wouldn't push for something that didn't deepen their pockets.
Texas Instruments didn't give guys like Morris Chang enough opportunities to advance.
That's why TSMC was founded.
Similar mistake is being made right now by restricting sales of chips. It forces people to make their own. It is just a matter of time the consequence comes … like many other decisions made by some big wigs before …
Yes, they have just forced China to make their own chips, and they will make them cheaper and in higher volume than anyone can do...
Absolutely correct; same for banning any other tech sales to China. I’m not sure it’s terrible policy, though. It’s only speeding up the inevitable a little.
China isn't working for America. Morris Chang was.
The pentagon is run by politics just like the rest of the country. The US wanted to move industry to other countries, so the Pentagon just played the party like they're used to do, and got the promotions and bonuses. Everything else is a second thought.
What governments that aren't your allies?
Chips are produced in Taiwan, in Korea, in Japan. In that order. Which of those governments is not allied with the US of A?
Read carefully :P close allies. Those allies are far allies. Sea lanes and supply chain risk is a real thing.
Is this some kind of joke? So who but Canada is your 'close ally' then?
It is a joke but it's also true. The entire Japan South Korea Taiwan situation is at a high risk, if actual conflict breaks out, Taiwan is out, and SK and Japan become trickier on shipping insurance costs alone, assuming they choose not to get involved (they probably will)
Obviously Mexico is also a close ally.
Japan cannot get involved unless the US is directly attacked, their constitution and laws governing use of the JSDF are very explicit in forbidding any use other than defending themselves or the US.
If (when?) Taiwan gets China'd, that by itself cannot serve as a casus belli for Japan.
I have no intimate knowledge with regards to South Korea's laws and will thus refrain from commenting there.
Japan can change this on a whim with one meeting of the legislature. You think Japan can't change its own laws?
Wrong. I don't know that they would, but Taiwan is a huge trading partner and great friend of Japan, in fact Japan's closest friend in the whole region. It's quite conceivable that Japan would get involved.
They literally cannot.
It can't amend the Constitution just with a vote in the Diet; it requires a supermajority in both Houses followed by a popular referendum.
China would attack US bases in Japan and that would trigger whatever needs to be triggered for Japan to enter the war. There’s no way that China would try and invade Taiwan while also not trying to stop the US from intervening.
I mean, if we are going to assume “China attacks Taiwan” means “China attacks US bases in Japan” we might ad well assume it means “China preemptively carpets Japan with nukes rendering any Japanese response irrelevant”, but in any case, no one is arguing that Japan would either not react to an actual attack on Japan that left them capable of response or would require Constitutional changes to do so. But “Japan” and “Taiwan” are still different things.
Since the US would come to the defense of Taiwan, it would use assets in the region so that includes naval and air assets. The air assets are based in locations such as Guam and Japan (among others). The US would launch sorties from those bases amongst others.
Can you think of a scenario in which China would attempt the worlds all-time largest amphibious invasion of Taiwan and then let the US just fly missions and drop in supplies or attack Chinese assets and not respond to the bases themselves? It seems incredibly unlikely to me.
There aren't any nukes that need to be involved here. Certainly there are potential scenarios in which those do get used, but neither the Chinese nor Americans have any strong desire to escalate a conventional war into a nuclear war. The scenario you are assuming would also include China and the US nuking each other and so that scenario itself is a bit silly whereas China attacking US air bases in the lead up to or during an invasion of Taiwan without escalating to nuclear weapons is a pretty serious scenario.
I get your point about Japan not being able to change their constitution so quickly and I don't disagree, but I think any scenario in which Taiwan is invaded and the US comes to its defense will drag Japan in to the war sufficiently enough that it will justify whatever it needs to do.
Laws are just words on paper. They are irrelevant without people to follow and enforce them.
It is very common for Constitutional laws to be suspended in the event of war. Even without suspension, all it takes is a leader with enough support to ignore the law.
Constitutions can be ignored if everyone wants it so.
Please have some clue about what you're talking about first:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_Japan#Amendmen...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_96_of_the_Japanese_Con...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_9_of_the_Japanese_Cons...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Mutual_Cooperation_a...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Japanese_military_legisla...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S.%E2%80%93Japan_Alliance
All that shit is irrelevant. The prime Minister of Japan is actively talking about defending Taiwan if it's attacked. The people of Japan probably won't complain. The US won't complain. South Korea won't complain. And that's not even counting a casus belli that might make it justifiable (e.g. some Japanese citizen in Taiwan gets harmed, or chind sends missiles to US based in Okinawa)
What exactly do you think is the punitive remedy for Japan breaking clauses in thosd documents in that political scenario?
The precarious position of Taiwan is the main reason for this.
https://www.metaculus.com/questions/11480/china-launches-inv...
Taiwan is a sacrificial ally. We support them, but don't acknowledge them formally.
While I agree with you I would say that supply chain is upstream of chip-production.
The mining industry needed those money not Intel. It's the mining industry that's been neglected the last 20 years or so.
It will take at least 10 years to get anything resembling chinese supply chain in place.
The chip supply chain is a lot shorter and more concentrated than the mining supply chain. If you're thinking of "rare earth" metals in particular, it's probably better to focus on the refining rather than digging out of the ground. Between South America, West Africa, and Australia there are lots of mines for most of the metals, but only refining in China (because it has been highly subsidized by both monetary and regulatory means since the 90s). Silicon refining is similarly bottlenecked even though the high quality input material is mostly US sand.
Refining is dirty and dangerous so it has been pushed out. Used to work for a Canadian gold mine in Montana in the mid 90's. Most of the friends I graduated with went overseas for new mines or were Environmental engineers focused on cleaning up messes from the late 1800's early 1900's.
Yeah, lack of regulation is actually a pretty big subsidy for large scale "rare earth" metal refining.
What's a few inland lakes of acid residue toxic metal soup along with tailings piles classified as low level radioactive waste between friends though?
These are still being created today, not just as a practice from the 1800's.
It is the price of technology, better to address these as we progress rather than pushing them out of mind and sight and kicking the can down the road for future generations.
There's substantial wafer capacity in the US, from silane production, through polysilicon granule production and wafer making. There are several different wafer makers in the US with both 200mm and 300mm wafer capacity.
Some of the silane and polysilicon companies are US owned, but I don't think that any of the wafer makers are US headquartered anymore.
Isn't all high grade silicon derived from one place in the US?
Spruce Pine - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spruce_Pine_Mining_District
It's the purest source, but lots of cheap PV poly is made from other stuff.
We HAVE have to focus on the rare earth part or you are basically just giving China the whole thing as they control more then 90% of refinement (and almost all of mining)
I wonder why...
That's a silly anecdote and I have a hard time believing chip fab line workers are too much different from those in other types of high-tech (where I spent 15 years working on test automation & quality systems). Some smart folks, for sure, but almost zero roles required even actual engineering background. A lot of management had strong technical education, but the vast majority of line workers are just following simple instructions.
I could be wrong about how fabs work, of course, and would love to learn more.
Having seen a few 'high tech' places myself: there's high tech, and then there's _high tech_.
Assembling a motherboard is to semiconductor fabs as flying a toy drone is to landing a Boeing 747. One you can learn in an afternoon; the other takes years to learn.
I disagree. I live next to a fab and have coworkers that have worked the fabs.
Humans in fabs are taken out of the loop as much as possible. That's because when dealing with nanoscale structures, human error is simply too common.
One of my coworkers worked at the fab during a period where they had humans running the forklift that moved the wafers from one stage to the next. That was cut out because the tiny bumps caused by a human operating the controls caused imperfections in the chips that decreased yield (the metric that matters most for a fab). They ultimately removed that work and job and replaced it with robots to carefully move the wafers.
What's complex about a fab ends up being not the frontline work, but rather the layer or 2 in the back (like designing the lithography filter for a given chip). That stuff happen outside the actual plant.
This. We are talking about Atom scale here. I have as much admiration for skilled mechanics as the next guy. I heard about a lathe operator at Patek Phillip who could turn an arbor to within 1 micron precision, just by listening to the pitch the cutting tool made when trimming it down.
And when chip features were on the micron scale, humans in the loop made sense. But chip feature are ten thousand times smaller than that now--4 orders of magnitude. Anything that doesn't need a Ph.D. in solid state physics to do is going to be automated.
There are still, though, lots of working fabs at much larger process sizes. And some for things that won't ever modernize to a smaller one. Like parts that handle lots of power, or chips for RF purposes, etc.
I'm probably revealing exactly which fab, but one issue the fab had is when it was built it was placed fairly close to the interstate. That did no matter when they were at something like 500nm. However, as they slowly pulled the node size down they started noticing random errors within their chips. It took a while to track it down but it turns out semi trucks driving past the interstate were causing defects in the chips.
They ended up installing shock absorbers everywhere to counteract this problem.
I think we agree? The point is that a semiconductor fab (like a 747) is so highly automated that you don't need a bunch of low- or medium-skilled folks to drive forklifts; you need a few high-skills folks to design, monitor, debug & optimize the huge system(s).
I think you underestimate the amount of people with high school education doing very precise, skilled work right now. Do you think skilled machines tend to have PHds or even bachelors?
Im not saying its as simple as CNC. I am saying that I doubt you need an IQ of 130 or a PHD. Start investing in the people whose labor were undercut. In fact a skilled machinist or technician seems like a much closer match (in terms of skill and willingness to do the job) than some with an electrical engineering PHD or something.
Skilled machinists?
It takes education and practice to take a CAD model or technical drawings and run the machines to produce it.
Sorry, I was just trying to clarify what "skilled machines" meant. I think they meant "skilled machinists"?
A 747 can pretty much land itself on autopilot.
What are the conditions and steps necessary to engage autopilot during landing? What are the failure conditions, and the steps necessary during a malfunction when autopilot is engaged?
On a clear day with perfect conditions ground control can probably get you on the ground and you walk away safely. The plane may not be safe to fly again, but you walk away. When there is bad weather (common) or other mechanical issues you need a lot more training, and of course if you want the plane to survive to fly again you want some more training.
The only hard part is contacting ground control in the first place. Radio frequencies change all the time.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2023/05/20/passengers-...
WaPo tried it out last year and only the fellow who was used to WW2 plane simulators was successful at a probably didn't die landing.
You cannot learn to assemble a motherboard using modern manufacturing equipment in an afternoon. Pick-and-place operation is a week-long course alone (specific to that machine, and assuming you are already familiar with the process), and there are at least a screen printer and reflow oven involved as well.
Yea fair lol - def an exaggeration. (And my experience is def not first hand, here)
But still - a lot easier than semiconductors
One of the most critical aspects of engineering is making it so advanced high tech things can be manufactured by the least skilled and least number of skilled people possible.
Don't confuse that with the workers not being skilled - many are, but just like good software, you want your designs to run well even when executed by the worst hardware.
Actually engineering often means need more skilled workers as the unskilled work was replaced. 1 person running the machine who understands more of the engineering as opposed to 100 with a saw.
The hard one to learn is flying a drone, right?
Making PhD engineers operate/maintain/monitor a wire bonding machine seems expensive.
I worked in an R&D fab (albeit, as an intern, many years ago) with an abnormal number of PhDs around (the fab was essentially a small scale test bed for new products and processes - everything tested there first before scaling up overseas). I think we had a 5:1 ratio of techs to engineers. This was in a fab that basically did nothing but R&D and low volume manufacturing for defense.
It's comparable to any kind of high-tech manufacturing where you have engineers designing/testing stuff (and designing the tools to make and test the stuff in the first place) while there have to be techs/mechanics/machine shop workers to actually do the work of making it. It's inefficient and expensive to put the engineers on that task, while they'll still need to do it from time to time.
Small anecdote: pat gelsinger, intel ceo, started as a technician at intel (iirc) at like years old or something like that.
That entry level job paid enough that he could have a roof on his head and i guess covered his university tuition?
I’m not making this up: it’s all in his book he wrote about his life (not sure I recommend the book)
True, but Pat Gelsinger isn't a good example of what public policy we should pursue to help Joe six-packs enjoy a middle-class life. Gelsinger is one of the few people I would follow blindly into the maws of hell itself; his intellect is exceeded only by his ability to lead.
Have you worked with the guy, like, in person or are you just being an enthusiastic fan?
Just trying to understand your point of view.
LTI and Santa Clara are not public institutions.
I am a little bit fascinated by the way that many people seem to think so highly of Gelsinger, and I even think it is possible that he will succeed in leveraging that to make Intel competitive.
However, just from his public persona of wildly optimistic sales/marketing pitches and showmanship, while outsourcing their own manufacturing to TSMC, I have a very bad impression.
Then his claims of Intel zettaflop machines by 2027 honestly make me think he is totally delusional, but maybe that does not matter.
I think people are also underestimating the intelligence of people in the once very large manufacturing workforce.
It doesn't help that the union culture is opposed to promoting smart people. If you work an assembly line you are not better than anyone else on the line, so their position makes sense - smart people are not worth more. However it also means smart people that want to move to management (want - if you are content that is your choice) find things worse: you are required to start at the bottom and your previous experience doesn't count for anything (including the pension)
The decline in American manufacturing happened alongside a decline in union membership in manufacturing. If unions were the causal factor, why do these trends coincide rather than oppose?
Alternative theory: Protectionism industrializes and trade liberalization deindustrializes. Alexander Hamilton's protectionist policies weren't just successful at industrializing the USA, he and his successors were correct as to why they were successful. The relatively recent shift to trade liberalization, by contrast, had the generally accepted effect of such policies on the industrial base. Of course, assets got pumped along the way and that's what really mattered to the people in charge.
Trade liberalization industrializes the world.
Unions were gutted because the labor market grew beyond international borders, but the labor movement didn't (thanks to western capitalists making war on socialists.)
the only cause here is higher wages make other countries more compelling.
The not promoting is a problem but it isn't the cause of decline.
You're missing the broader point here which is that TSMC pays roughly $50k/year for people with these skills. Sure, you may be able to find the talent pool, but at what price?
I think an important question here is: how exactly can TSMC afford to pay $50k for people with these skills? And why is that impossible in the US? I think this comes down to relative cost-of-living differences: the US is just too expensive to live in these days. Taiwan is not a super low-cost-of-living country by any means, but the US has gotten ridiculously expensive compared to most other peer nations, and this means it's pricing itself out of the market with anything where it needs to compete.
Personally, I think America's reliance on cars and its suburban layout is a big part of this. Workers in Taipei don't need to own a car to get to work, and the overall infrastructure cost per capita is much lower.
Just in case they are paying attention, I would love to relocate and go to work for Intel. Following simple instructions sounds terrific, to me. Where do I send my resume?
Maybe too much money is exactly the problem? I rarely see people tackling hard problem for money, because it is not an efficient way of making money.
Too much money in what context? It can be an extremely effective motivator for solving a business problem - hire smart people to work on it, they'll happily go work for double their pay.
A baby can't be made in one month just because you had the money to hire 9 surrogates.
Many processes do not scale just because a money spigot turned on. What most often does scale as quickly as monetary availability is fraud, waste and abuse.
There are thousands of items on the agenda in the present day, everything from better open source LLMs to moon-base railway designs, so even if 99% of these turn out to be duds that can’t be budged, there are still sufficiently many remaining to absorb all bonafide super-geniuses on Earth several times over.
That's exactly the problem. We don't have an abundant supply of supergeniuses
If there was an ‘abundant supply’ most of them wouldn’t be considered such any longer, just regular geniuses, because the population average would have been raised up.
In this particular item on the agenda, chip fabs, it is not clear spending more money one time will produce a result, much less a faster result by attracting "bonafide super-geniouses." One might respond that "you can't win if you don't play" which would lay bare the gamble.
Chip fabs is just one of ‘many processes’ which was what I was replying to. It’s practically irrelevant if even 99% of all processes have this characteristic. There’s way more than enough remaining to occupy all available people who could actually speed up large complex projects by 10x.
Of course if they were somehow disproportionately forced to only ever work on chip fabs for the rest of their lives, then that would create huge waste, but this doesn’t seem likely.
Couldn't you keep hiring surrogates until you get a premature birth?
While you could convince me that too much money would attract the wrong type of people, you would be hard pressed to find more competent people by offering less money. (I'm not dismissing that there are other motivations involved, just the ability to grow a talent pool by offering less.)
Once you have a "good life" you start looking for other things than money. I know a few people who have quit a good job they didn't like for one that paid a little less but they liked more. Though there is a limit to how far someone can go down in pay before they don't like the new job because of pay.
Well, I was there in the late 90's and don't recall that anecdote. Most of the people in the fab shuttle the lots from station to station. Some even look at porn and get high while waiting (that's my anecdote, clean room alarms went bananas when he lit up). And robots that zip around the ceiling and drop down in dangerous areas do the rest.
Mind citing your anecdote? I realize I wasn't in every fab, but it's not rocket science, even on 300mm and beyond.
chuckle Asking for further justification is always fair play, and I don't mind being checked....but I'm kind of a loss as to what to cite. It wasn't something I read in a book, it was lived experience.
But, I mean when you say:
you might have answered your own question...that stuff may have flied when we were at 180 nanometers, but lets face it, there's only so far down the road of Moore's law you can travel with people who smoke in a clean room...
Just show me where PhDs are needed to wheel a batch of wafers from the litho room to the bath. I'll wait.
If you think that is the bulk of what people in fabs do, well… obviously you aren’t a golfer.
There's thousands of people working at D1X. They are not all PhDs. Your initial post is just some made up BS polluting hacker news. I really like this site, but if you want points for storytelling, go to slashdot or reddit.
Hardware people get boned.
I worked at a non-semiconductor tenant company in a semiconductor research campus/facility.
Parking lots tell the story. There was a pecking order for the lots, which made it easy to classify. The best off working people were the trades guys. The plumbers and electricians were high-skilled and well paid. Like guys commuting 2,000 miles and buying a second $90k F-250 to drive around town in.
The bigshots were Teslas, BMWs, big SUVs. There were a few corvettes and a Ferrari.
The Fab engineers and workers were all driving old Hondas and Hyundais.
One of my good friends from high school was a mechanical engineer at IBM and a master at some super-critical process for mainframes. They moved to a different architecture and his entire team was just nuked from orbit before they even knew what was happening. He was selling real estate for awhile and eventually got back into engineering.
I don't think you can draw conclusions from that, considering you have absolutely no idea who is in massive debt for those vehicles. Especially with tradesfolk because the vehicle is a business expense.
People making good money tend to not, as a cohort, drive 8 year old cheap cars.
And of course ymmv between companies, regions, facilities or projects. There are software people trapped maintaining stupid legacy insurance code and similar dreck too.
I work at a hardware company. Our parking lot looks like a Tesla, Rivian and Mazarati dealership.
Why did Intel HAVE to fire most line workers and hire Ph.Ds?
Well, even back in my grandfather's day (he was a millwright for Ford) working on the line required more mental skills than most people realized. Remember when Elon Musk finally gave up trying to 100% automate his factories? He said "we undervalued the abilities of humans."
If manufacturing cars is so complex you can't train monkeys, or build robots, to do it, how much harder must it be to make chips?
Making things that small, that precisely, repeatably, profitably, by the millions and billions, is spectacularly complex. And with each process node, the complexity grows even faster than Moore's law does.
Eventually, it gets to the point that even to tell somebody how to do something, you need to do it using the language of advanced physics, the kind of physics which requires you to spend studying 60-80 hours a week, for 5-7 years in grad school to learn. As the gen-X proverb goes, reality bites.
You should hire the very smart people to figure out how to make the jobs doable for average people. Surely there must be a way to configure line work to not require a PhD...
Anything which doesn't require a Ph.D. in solid-state physics to do must be automated, because only machines can handle/manipulate/transport the wafers with enough precision not to damage them.
Intel became the biggest sponsor of EE H1Bs in this time frame. They were trading competent citizens for compliant serfs.
There's something off in this thread, which seems to posit that all of this is about Intel moving fab capacity back to the US and away from unreliable places.
That is clearly not the reality: according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_manufacturing_si..., 16 of 23 of Intel's fabs are in the US and 6 of the other 7 are in close allies (Ireland, Israel, Germany).
There may be something to be said about what's happened to the rest of the US fab industry, though.
Aren't the vast majority of line workers in a fab people with a bachelors degree (or less)? The process engineers might be PhDs, but not most of the folks working in the fabs. Also, fabs are becoming more and more automated, so less people are needed overall.
IIRC The original chips act had a provision that companies would have to train and hire X% of non-white/non-asian engineers.
Could her health problem stem from the fact that she worked at the chip fab? Those places are notorious for using chemicals that are harmful to humans.
Out of all the stories that never happened, yours never happened the most.