Huawei and SMIC quietly rolled out a new Kirin 9000C processor.
Chinese foundry SMIC may have broken the 5nm process barrier, as evidenced by a new Huawei laptop listed with an advanced chip with 5nm manufacturing tech — a feat previously thought impossible due to U.S sanctions.
And the manufacturing can’t be brought back home, because the domestic costs of production have skyrocketed thanks to the financialization of everything in the interim period.
Also because manufacturing takes a lot of skill, and so much of it has been outsourced for so long that the Western world simply lacks the infrastructure to be able to do it. And infrastructure in this case doesn’t just mean equipment. Equipment could be procured quickly. It a also means a population with the relevant education for and, above all, experience with working in large scale manufacturing of complicated products.
Once upon a time “Made in China” really did mean that something was of dubious quality. Back when they started putting all the manufacturing in China simply because it was cheap and China was still getting to grips with how to do this large scale manufacturing with no experience and a severe lack of people educated in how it worked. Two or three generations later and that is no longer the case. Unsurprisingly, people raised and educated from birth in the world’s largest manufacturer of goods are kind of good at making stuff. But moving production back would mean more than just building factories and machines. It would mean accepting that two or so decades long period where you are just learning how to make stuff in the 21st century.
Exactly. Not only the infrastructure, but also the expertise for it. You can’t build on the knowledge of hundreds of engineers with decades of expertise in a subject without having the facilities. Especially with the new crop of engineers, 70% of whom are coming out of school basically running everything through Chat GPT and not actually understanding how anything works, setting them years behind their international competition. It’s not even their fault though, only the top 5% of engineering schools get any kind of real funding, everything else is expected to get additional funding through endowments, which means even STEM curriculum gets massively underfunded to what it would take to actually industrialize the nation intellectually, which is what we would need since we do not have the labor based to support that. There is literally only one school in the U.S. that does a masters or doctorate program in manufacturing engineering for welding. One. For the whole country. There are only a few schools in the U.S. that offer plastics engineering, or even generalized manufacturing engineering.
What’s the one school?
University of Ohio, pretty sure it is in Boise, but most of those professional graduates degrees are mostly online these days.