Given the geopolitical (and seismic) risk of having many of the world's most advanced fabs in Taiwan, it seems like it makes sense to try to locate more of them in the US from a national security standpoint (I guess that would be a 'right' argument - or at least traditionally the right was concerned about national security). Given that Intel (for better or worse) is the US' most advanced semiconductor company and that they know how to build fabs it seems like it makes sense to send some $$ their way to build more fabs in the US (I guess that would be a 'left' argument?). The market doesn't seem like it's going to optimize for the national security issue so the gov stepped in with the CHIPs act.
Can you imagine any market-based mechanism that would address this problem on it's own? Keep in mind that it takes at least 5 years from the time a fab is planned until it's operational. And it takes about $10B to build a competitive fab. The market prioritized social media from about 2005 to 2020 or so, and seemed to de-prioritize investment in things like semiconductor production. That doesn't seem to have worked out so well for us.
it feels terrible when incompetent people take over and start pissing away our money, essentially holding whatever defense concern they managed to monopolize as a hostage. So that part to me is very depressing.
My bigger point was that this process is not linear or predictable. Saturn rocket was a miracle that seemingly no market forces could afford to build. Organizations that built that miracle have exhausted and are nowadays essentially welfare. Now, SpaceX and starlink are a private miracle that was hard to imagine just a couple decades ago. Not sure what the moral is here, but somehow we seem to find a way, whether private or public.
Can you imagine any market-based mechanism that would address this problem on it's own? Keep in mind that it takes at least 5 years from the time a fab is planned until it's operational. And it takes about $10B to build a competitive fab. The market prioritized social media from about 2005 to 2020 or so, and seemed to de-prioritize investment in things like semiconductor production. That doesn't seem to have worked out so well for us.