This is actually a good video (I say actually because this youtuber sometimes has surface-level reporting on things, but this one is quite a bit better).
It's investigative on-the-ground reporting of the TSMC plant in Arizona, and the recent SemiCon West conference.
This is just anecdote, but my roommate's dad works in construction management specifically for semiconductor fabs, and he was working for about a year on one of Intel's new fabs in Arizona up until a few months ago when the entire project was suddenly scrapped. IIRC he got the sense it was someone high up in intel that decided to pull the plug on it.
Fabs need pretty solid foundations IIRC, the systems don't like vibration. So this won't have been a cheap build. I also believe the construction methods for clean room is like a VOC purge on steroids. Whatever else goes into this build would have a huge impact on potentially reclaiming it for VLSI.
Intel didn't cancel any fabs in Arizona, one just came online. They killed plans Fabs in Poland and Germany, and the Ohio fab is on hold. You don't get the money up front, so nothing to give back.
I mean, not to sound rude, but of course it would be someone high up who would make that decision. It’s not like a grunt could decide to scrap a whole new fab
Yea fair. What I was trying to say was that it seemed like a decision that was less the construction/development team saying "this plan isn't workable for xyz reason and we need to reconsider our approach" and more someone high up saying "we are cancelling this and we won't say why".
I could be wrong but I’d assume what the OP is trying to say is that the leadership of these companies does not want these fabs to actually open and work. That something transpired maybe between them and govt.
No, it was me, sorry, I was dropping off the sand for the chips. Couldn’t find this Airyzone place so I gave up and made a nice sandcastle instead. It was definitely a premium sandcastle, but the tide took it away.
I left the semiconductor industry 30 years ago but back then every company had "a fab that hasn't been completed in Arizona" that people would talk fondly of perhaps opening one day if business picks up. Seems like not much has changed.
I always thought it was funny that for my entire lifetime people have talked about Arizona being perfect for fabs because it's dry there and not subject to tremors meanwhile Taiwan where 60% of all chips are produced (and 90% of the most sensitive ones) is tropical and has earthquakes fairly frequently.
China Airlines recently opened a new direct flight route between Taoyuan and Phoenix. They've been plastering it all over their plane signage. I thought it was funny that the flight must be pretty empty other than the handful of TSMC employees that need to go there.
Why do you think the Chinese people from Taiwan want to do anything in Arizona? They're there just to placate the orange guy's rage. They'll never do anything special there.
Chaos monkey yes...but more like desperation for survival. Its the same mentality that drives Israel. As been shown a few times, it mutates into a sick culture with unintended consequences...but obviously it does produce results.
I love Asianometry! The semiconductor history videos are incredible. The level of quality on that channel just blows my mind. It’s one of the best examples of the revolution happening in high-quality, independently produced content.
I actually first heard about it from the Acquired podcast, which is another great example of that same trend.
What's TSMC's headcount down in AZ? I ask because Intel has laid off or retired around 40k employees in the past two years and they still need to cut a little more to please the new boss.
how competitive will american made cpu's be? will american consumers just end up paying n * more for same product that the rest of the world gets from taiwan?
I don’t think the mix of engineers we’ve been producing is right for this. We need a whole generation of folks at a higher hardware:software ratio. Check back in a decade to see if we’ve seriously started.
America could import it if the current administration wasn’t so hell bent on repelling global talent through inflicting great cost and uncertainty upon the talent
Even this forum can’t decide whether skilled personnel are a boon because they positively contribute to the local economy, or a negative because they undermine employment prospects for locals.
There really is a big difference betwwwn needing to import engineers to create high end chips and WITCH companies using h1B to get cheap contractors to do enterprise dev or any software development except something really specialized
And attract them away from what? What are these skilled people doing? Does a photolithography skill set enable you to moonlight at some other gig such that they're here and keeping their skills fresh and we're just not noticing?
Software. Talk to anybody in the hardware space, and compare their experience to software.
Hell, the only two people I see in this thread that claim hardware experience are saying that it's a better career move to switch to software.
Software is easier, pays better, and has far better employers. Until hardware companies realize the situation they've created, they will lose their workforce to greener pastures.
Software has also benefitted from a massive tax subsidy relative to hardware, as the latter requires a massive capital investment. Hardware requires expensive real estate, and benefits from saving the spending, whereas software can exist on debt and small footprints.
I was a fab tool owner. My last paycheck in a semiconductor position was in the mid-200s. I went into software and make double that in the same metro. Same level of responsibility. I don’t even work in machine learning.
To take your photolithography example though, I know someone who went litho tool owner -> camera team at Apple -> Meta reality labs. FAANGs want semiconductor process engineers just so they can spend all day yelling at underpaid Asian vendor semiconductor process engineers who are doing the actual work.
I worked at a US college that had a big semiconductor engineering and manufacturing engineering program. They were about 20-30% international, but the program wasn’t huge.
Frankly, it’s shitty work. Software is where it’s at. Hardware people get paid peanuts and work really hard. When you’re a master of a particular technology, you get discarded when the next thing comes along. Ask the people at Intel or IBM. The best jobs are the execs and the tradesmen.
Have you seen how much of a premium Americans are already paying for chips in the face of constrained supply?
Gamers are still buying them and so is everyone else
Given that this is the same curiosity and question since pre-pandemic and now we have many examples of a premium, I think its not a real worry as long as the chips perform
I keep seeing this in every industry. "We can't give up America because they buy so much"
"China needs the American market because they can't make up the numbers for the rest of the world combined in the short term"
Can people here help answer where the heck does everyone have the money to buy all this stuff? Especially post COVID with all the layoffs? The US is only 5% of the world population. Europe isn't that poor and many chunks of Asia have a lot of wealth now. Yet America's appetite and more importantly capability of absorbing all manner of goods remains unimpaired...how?!
It's wild but true. History provides a partial explanation. In 1960 the US was 40% of the world economy while only being 5% of the world population. It's still about 25% of the world economy today.
The thing is that WW2 decimated most of the advanced economies outside of the US, and for decades afterwards many of them simply weren't managed for growth (i.e. the Soviet bloc). So the US had a huge head start and never stopped running. To this day you still don't really see many other countries being as fixated on juicing consumer spending as the US is. The big play of the last few decades has been all these emerging economies getting good at exports and making a lot of money that way, which has cut into the US' lead, but once they have the money they tend to be less aggressive about getting it circulating internally - it accrues to a fairly small number of people and/or they just sit on a lot of it.
part of the problem is that to get yourself to export competitiveness, you have to essentially underpay workers through restrictions on capital and credit; and once you have done so, these export businesses become so central to the economy and to economic identity that it is politically tricky to reorient the economy.
Add on moralizing about how people should be making and not spending and you've got yourself a recipe for an export-oriented slowdown, since at some point the world won't be wealthy enough to keep raising your economy through only exports. We saw this in Japan, South Korea, and more recently Germany and China.
Its pretty impressive and brings you into macroeconomics and monetary policy
Its a long answer but there are many winners in every financial environment in America, while the short answer is that nobody knows how they have money en masse to buy stuff
and the whole system is based on incentivizing them to move that money around the economy, as opposed to collect and save it in a bank account
This video has lots of details, but conspicuously absent is exactly WHAT chips are being made in Arizona. I guess it's still a closely-guarded secret for some reason.
If you haven't already, I encourage you to subscribe this guys channel - Asianometry. How he finds the time to reserach in such detail such a wide range of tek-related subjects is beyond me.
That’s a good point, he did a video in my space recently and while it sounded impressive it was clear he only had a surface level understanding of the domain. Still impressive, but I find it hard to trust folks that represent themselves as experts on topics they’re not really experts in.
This is actually a good video (I say actually because this youtuber sometimes has surface-level reporting on things, but this one is quite a bit better).
It's investigative on-the-ground reporting of the TSMC plant in Arizona, and the recent SemiCon West conference.
This is just anecdote, but my roommate's dad works in construction management specifically for semiconductor fabs, and he was working for about a year on one of Intel's new fabs in Arizona up until a few months ago when the entire project was suddenly scrapped. IIRC he got the sense it was someone high up in intel that decided to pull the plug on it.
https://www.wsj.com/tech/intels-chips-act-requirements-waive...
https://archive.is/nhLyB
Fabs need pretty solid foundations IIRC, the systems don't like vibration. So this won't have been a cheap build. I also believe the construction methods for clean room is like a VOC purge on steroids. Whatever else goes into this build would have a huge impact on potentially reclaiming it for VLSI.
New CEO started in March, I vaguely recall him cancelling fabs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lip-Bu_Tan
So are they going to give back the money they got from the feds to build them?
Intel didn't cancel any fabs in Arizona, one just came online. They killed plans Fabs in Poland and Germany, and the Ohio fab is on hold. You don't get the money up front, so nothing to give back.
The govt got shares instead already
lol.
I mean, not to sound rude, but of course it would be someone high up who would make that decision. It’s not like a grunt could decide to scrap a whole new fab
Yea fair. What I was trying to say was that it seemed like a decision that was less the construction/development team saying "this plan isn't workable for xyz reason and we need to reconsider our approach" and more someone high up saying "we are cancelling this and we won't say why".
I could be wrong but I’d assume what the OP is trying to say is that the leadership of these companies does not want these fabs to actually open and work. That something transpired maybe between them and govt.
No, it was me, sorry, I was dropping off the sand for the chips. Couldn’t find this Airyzone place so I gave up and made a nice sandcastle instead. It was definitely a premium sandcastle, but the tide took it away.
I left the semiconductor industry 30 years ago but back then every company had "a fab that hasn't been completed in Arizona" that people would talk fondly of perhaps opening one day if business picks up. Seems like not much has changed.
I always thought it was funny that for my entire lifetime people have talked about Arizona being perfect for fabs because it's dry there and not subject to tremors meanwhile Taiwan where 60% of all chips are produced (and 90% of the most sensitive ones) is tropical and has earthquakes fairly frequently.
I can only imagine what the Taiwanese can do in Arizona. Truly a synergy for the ages.
China Airlines recently opened a new direct flight route between Taoyuan and Phoenix. They've been plastering it all over their plane signage. I thought it was funny that the flight must be pretty empty other than the handful of TSMC employees that need to go there.
Maybe that's why yields there are better? [1]
[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/ts...
Once you're in a air-conditioned environment the outside world doesn't matter.
More likely he compared the 4nm yield to the 3nm yield in Taiwan?
Then why would nations around the world protect Taiwan?
Why do you think the Chinese people from Taiwan want to do anything in Arizona? They're there just to placate the orange guy's rage. They'll never do anything special there.
Maybe chaos monkeys help innovation
Chaos monkey yes...but more like desperation for survival. Its the same mentality that drives Israel. As been shown a few times, it mutates into a sick culture with unintended consequences...but obviously it does produce results.
Who are you to judge people’s culture? I bet yours isn’t much better
"death river strategy"
Tell us more about your insights, as a clueless outsider
https://www.azcentral.com/story/money/business/tech/2025/10/...
well, intel is loser on semiconductor boom
I love Asianometry! The semiconductor history videos are incredible. The level of quality on that channel just blows my mind. It’s one of the best examples of the revolution happening in high-quality, independently produced content.
I actually first heard about it from the Acquired podcast, which is another great example of that same trend.
What's TSMC's headcount down in AZ? I ask because Intel has laid off or retired around 40k employees in the past two years and they still need to cut a little more to please the new boss.
Ime, most of those cuts were employees working on legacy nodes and processes - especially at Beaverton.
how competitive will american made cpu's be? will american consumers just end up paying n * more for same product that the rest of the world gets from taiwan?
I don’t think the mix of engineers we’ve been producing is right for this. We need a whole generation of folks at a higher hardware:software ratio. Check back in a decade to see if we’ve seriously started.
Does America need to produce the talent or can they import it?
America could import it if the current administration wasn’t so hell bent on repelling global talent through inflicting great cost and uncertainty upon the talent
Even this forum can’t decide whether skilled personnel are a boon because they positively contribute to the local economy, or a negative because they undermine employment prospects for locals.
There really is a big difference betwwwn needing to import engineers to create high end chips and WITCH companies using h1B to get cheap contractors to do enterprise dev or any software development except something really specialized
I think the policy is “immigrate your complement.”
The talent is already here, the employers just need to pay better.
And attract them away from what? What are these skilled people doing? Does a photolithography skill set enable you to moonlight at some other gig such that they're here and keeping their skills fresh and we're just not noticing?
Software. Talk to anybody in the hardware space, and compare their experience to software.
Hell, the only two people I see in this thread that claim hardware experience are saying that it's a better career move to switch to software.
Software is easier, pays better, and has far better employers. Until hardware companies realize the situation they've created, they will lose their workforce to greener pastures.
Software has also benefitted from a massive tax subsidy relative to hardware, as the latter requires a massive capital investment. Hardware requires expensive real estate, and benefits from saving the spending, whereas software can exist on debt and small footprints.
I was a fab tool owner. My last paycheck in a semiconductor position was in the mid-200s. I went into software and make double that in the same metro. Same level of responsibility. I don’t even work in machine learning.
To take your photolithography example though, I know someone who went litho tool owner -> camera team at Apple -> Meta reality labs. FAANGs want semiconductor process engineers just so they can spend all day yelling at underpaid Asian vendor semiconductor process engineers who are doing the actual work.
They cannot produce it (in large quantities) and it's getting harder and harder to import talent.
I worked at a US college that had a big semiconductor engineering and manufacturing engineering program. They were about 20-30% international, but the program wasn’t huge.
Frankly, it’s shitty work. Software is where it’s at. Hardware people get paid peanuts and work really hard. When you’re a master of a particular technology, you get discarded when the next thing comes along. Ask the people at Intel or IBM. The best jobs are the execs and the tradesmen.
Well, they can't import it any more.
I am guessing that it’s a highly automated process, so per unit costs are not going to be affected much by the cost of labor.
Have you seen how much of a premium Americans are already paying for chips in the face of constrained supply?
Gamers are still buying them and so is everyone else
Given that this is the same curiosity and question since pre-pandemic and now we have many examples of a premium, I think its not a real worry as long as the chips perform
I keep seeing this in every industry. "We can't give up America because they buy so much"
"China needs the American market because they can't make up the numbers for the rest of the world combined in the short term"
Can people here help answer where the heck does everyone have the money to buy all this stuff? Especially post COVID with all the layoffs? The US is only 5% of the world population. Europe isn't that poor and many chunks of Asia have a lot of wealth now. Yet America's appetite and more importantly capability of absorbing all manner of goods remains unimpaired...how?!
It's wild but true. History provides a partial explanation. In 1960 the US was 40% of the world economy while only being 5% of the world population. It's still about 25% of the world economy today.
The thing is that WW2 decimated most of the advanced economies outside of the US, and for decades afterwards many of them simply weren't managed for growth (i.e. the Soviet bloc). So the US had a huge head start and never stopped running. To this day you still don't really see many other countries being as fixated on juicing consumer spending as the US is. The big play of the last few decades has been all these emerging economies getting good at exports and making a lot of money that way, which has cut into the US' lead, but once they have the money they tend to be less aggressive about getting it circulating internally - it accrues to a fairly small number of people and/or they just sit on a lot of it.
part of the problem is that to get yourself to export competitiveness, you have to essentially underpay workers through restrictions on capital and credit; and once you have done so, these export businesses become so central to the economy and to economic identity that it is politically tricky to reorient the economy.
Add on moralizing about how people should be making and not spending and you've got yourself a recipe for an export-oriented slowdown, since at some point the world won't be wealthy enough to keep raising your economy through only exports. We saw this in Japan, South Korea, and more recently Germany and China.
Yes there have been post-Covid layoffs, but unemployment is 4.3%, roughly at the "full employment" level, and only up 1 point from the post-Covid low.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE
Its pretty impressive and brings you into macroeconomics and monetary policy
Its a long answer but there are many winners in every financial environment in America, while the short answer is that nobody knows how they have money en masse to buy stuff
and the whole system is based on incentivizing them to move that money around the economy, as opposed to collect and save it in a bank account
America is rich as fuck dog.
everyone pays the premium now not just the USA.
this would represent an additional cost on top of that that only USA consumers pays.
Of course cost is an issue. If costs are higher than in Asia, everybody else in the world is going to buy Asian chips, not American ones.
Get ready for your 8 year repayment plan with TMOBILE!
Is America's semiconductor boom real?
How much capacity are we building?
What processes? What types of semiconductor products? High end? Middle? Low?
How much capacity?
Can we substitute or replace Taiwan in the future in the event of conflict?
I can't watch the video right now, but I'm curious about its claims. Or any additional HNer context.
This video has lots of details, but conspicuously absent is exactly WHAT chips are being made in Arizona. I guess it's still a closely-guarded secret for some reason.
It's not the high-end type. Otherwise they would announce it.
If you haven't already, I encourage you to subscribe this guys channel - Asianometry. How he finds the time to reserach in such detail such a wide range of tek-related subjects is beyond me.
If you know about a topic well, his videos are not as accurate as he may try to make you believe
That’s a good point, he did a video in my space recently and while it sounded impressive it was clear he only had a surface level understanding of the domain. Still impressive, but I find it hard to trust folks that represent themselves as experts on topics they’re not really experts in.
Do you mind sharing which specific video it was?
He probably has a team who helps him. He makes bank so not unrealistic
Mr Gemini and Mrs Claude
I think he still has a dayjob actually, or at least until recently. So I'm not sure wether he has staff.