Nvidia Corp. Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang, who runs the semiconductor industry’s most valuable company, said the US is as much as 20 years away from breaking its dependence on overseas chipmaking.
There aren’t enough people with the skills required. It’s highly specialized, both for designing the process itself as well as implementing it and designing chips for that process. It’s not like coding where anyone can do it with the help of Google and falling quality of code is covered by increasing quality of chips.
And the foundry is only one part of it. It doesn’t take raw materials as input, so you need another plant to make silicon wafers. And it doesn’t give chips ready to be stuck into a PC as output, you need packaging and qualification, and then maybe another step where the package is attached to a board, depending on the chip. None of these steps are simple and in some cases, even janitorial work wouldn’t be unskilled because a spec of dust can turn a $1000 chip into a $200 chip or even a $2 decoration.
Each of those steps takes a different set of specialized skills to pull off well. And the skills that can do these jobs are already in high demand, so it’s not like there’s a bunch of unemployed people waiting to do these jobs. Some might like the challenge of starting something new, but many would have to be offered more money to pull them away from their current job.
It’ll take time to educate enough people to fill those roles.
If there was no difference in labour costs or materials, why weren’t they already being produced domestically?
There aren’t enough people with the skills required. It’s highly specialized, both for designing the process itself as well as implementing it and designing chips for that process. It’s not like coding where anyone can do it with the help of Google and falling quality of code is covered by increasing quality of chips.
And the foundry is only one part of it. It doesn’t take raw materials as input, so you need another plant to make silicon wafers. And it doesn’t give chips ready to be stuck into a PC as output, you need packaging and qualification, and then maybe another step where the package is attached to a board, depending on the chip. None of these steps are simple and in some cases, even janitorial work wouldn’t be unskilled because a spec of dust can turn a $1000 chip into a $200 chip or even a $2 decoration.
Each of those steps takes a different set of specialized skills to pull off well. And the skills that can do these jobs are already in high demand, so it’s not like there’s a bunch of unemployed people waiting to do these jobs. Some might like the challenge of starting something new, but many would have to be offered more money to pull them away from their current job.
It’ll take time to educate enough people to fill those roles.
environmental laws, tax laws, benefits requirements, subsidies, regulations, approval processes…
So in other words, it would have been more expensive.