Isn’t it reliant on places like Israel, Taiwan, and South Korea? And how many of those places invested in such capacities to guarantee a degree of US protection and involvement.
Mostly Taiwan. South Korea doesn’t do it for protection, if it did well they screwed up badly because samsung botched their nodes even worse than intel did for years.
Intel is reliant on Israel for engineers. Very difficult to replace and unlikely that they would move over to the US. The brain drain in the US is real in part thanks to EE wages not matching up with booming software engineering wages and the US treating manufacturing like an afterthought in general.
South Korea does do it in some part for protection in my opinion. North Korea are a very unpleasant neighbour, allied with China, and SK depends on US support as a deterrent. The primary benefit is that it’s the heart of their economy, but I believe that defence is also a factor.
Being at a critical part of many crucial supply chains means that the US has a very strong interest in making sure SK keeps producing. Even if you look at advanced products mostly made in Taiwan - e.g. the nvidia H100s, the CoWoS packaging is done by SK Hynix.
The issue is that Russia has shown us that they don’t give a shit about how large the benefit is, they would rather be imperially hostile. Germany and the EU thought that hundreds of billions in trade would be enough to deter Russia, but it clearly wasn’t.
The West is now, rightfully so, worried that China is thinking the same way in regards to Taiwan.
To be fair to Russia I think they envisioned a complete rolling of Ukraine, if they had known that it in fact would be a 2 year+ long war leaving 150k of their men dead and most of the equipment depleted they’d have maybe not done it.
What do Israel and South Korea make that is so unique? I’m pretty sure the primary dependency is on Taiwan (specifically TSMC), which itself has a dependency on technology from the Netherlands (specifically ASML) and supply from China.
Don’t know about South Korea, but both intel and Nvidia are heavily invested in Israel (Intel does chip assembly in Israel and Nvidia has a number of AI focused projects there)
South Korea is the second most advanced fab nation, and they are also very involved in some parts of the supply chain even for TSMC manufactured parts - e.g. SK Hynix does a lot of the CoWoS packaging.
Also, South Korea produces a lot of RAM, Solid State Drives, and many other things like display panels.
Israel has a lot of Intel’s fabs and South Korea has a lot of Samsung’s fabs. Losing any one of the three would lead to a chip shortage and economic disaster, but Taiwan is usually the one that’s talked about, because it’s the one in potential geopolitical jeopardy.
The reality is that you’re going to see more places investing in these capabilities now, precisely because the chip shortage has shown how critical these capabilities are.
The ability to manufacture these is no longer simply an economic consideration. For countries that can afford it, it is a security consideration as well, and that changes the calculus of how much they’re willing to invest in their own industries and infrastructure.
On the other hand, thinking that putting in a bit of money in is going to make a difference is wishful thinking. The US put tens of billions into the CHIPS act, but this is a one-time off thing. Taiwan and TSMC invests tens of billions every year to keep its edge, and has been doing so for decades.
Isn’t it reliant on places like Israel, Taiwan, and South Korea? And how many of those places invested in such capacities to guarantee a degree of US protection and involvement.
Mostly Taiwan. South Korea doesn’t do it for protection, if it did well they screwed up badly because samsung botched their nodes even worse than intel did for years.
Intel is reliant on Israel for engineers. Very difficult to replace and unlikely that they would move over to the US. The brain drain in the US is real in part thanks to EE wages not matching up with booming software engineering wages and the US treating manufacturing like an afterthought in general.
South Korea does do it in some part for protection in my opinion. North Korea are a very unpleasant neighbour, allied with China, and SK depends on US support as a deterrent. The primary benefit is that it’s the heart of their economy, but I believe that defence is also a factor.
Being at a critical part of many crucial supply chains means that the US has a very strong interest in making sure SK keeps producing. Even if you look at advanced products mostly made in Taiwan - e.g. the nvidia H100s, the CoWoS packaging is done by SK Hynix.
The issue is that Russia has shown us that they don’t give a shit about how large the benefit is, they would rather be imperially hostile. Germany and the EU thought that hundreds of billions in trade would be enough to deter Russia, but it clearly wasn’t.
The West is now, rightfully so, worried that China is thinking the same way in regards to Taiwan.
To be fair to Russia I think they envisioned a complete rolling of Ukraine, if they had known that it in fact would be a 2 year+ long war leaving 150k of their men dead and most of the equipment depleted they’d have maybe not done it.
What do Israel and South Korea make that is so unique? I’m pretty sure the primary dependency is on Taiwan (specifically TSMC), which itself has a dependency on technology from the Netherlands (specifically ASML) and supply from China.
Don’t know about South Korea, but both intel and Nvidia are heavily invested in Israel (Intel does chip assembly in Israel and Nvidia has a number of AI focused projects there)
South Korea is the second most advanced fab nation, and they are also very involved in some parts of the supply chain even for TSMC manufactured parts - e.g. SK Hynix does a lot of the CoWoS packaging.
Also, South Korea produces a lot of RAM, Solid State Drives, and many other things like display panels.
isreal is where intel’s test fab and cpu engineering teams are
Israel has a lot of Intel’s fabs and South Korea has a lot of Samsung’s fabs. Losing any one of the three would lead to a chip shortage and economic disaster, but Taiwan is usually the one that’s talked about, because it’s the one in potential geopolitical jeopardy.
The reality is that you’re going to see more places investing in these capabilities now, precisely because the chip shortage has shown how critical these capabilities are.
The ability to manufacture these is no longer simply an economic consideration. For countries that can afford it, it is a security consideration as well, and that changes the calculus of how much they’re willing to invest in their own industries and infrastructure.
On the other hand, thinking that putting in a bit of money in is going to make a difference is wishful thinking. The US put tens of billions into the CHIPS act, but this is a one-time off thing. Taiwan and TSMC invests tens of billions every year to keep its edge, and has been doing so for decades.