So, roughly a thousand bucks
per head of US population? Aye well, as long as the money goes around and around...
The United States Senate has passed the Innovation and Competition Act of 2021, a sweeping stimulus program that seeks to secure supply chains and stimulate industry — especially high-technology industries — to ensure America remains ahead of China. “We are in a competition to win the 21st century, and the starting gun has …
... In no way is this state aid, oh no, that would be wrong. Nope we are just helping multi-billion dollar corporations protect the USA from illegal state aided companies overseas. This is NOT state aid.... And those multi-billion dollar tax breaks? Oh look there is a bird on the window ledge.
Intel (and other US companies) fell behind TSMC and Samsung by cutting their R&D investment so that they could give bigger dividends to shareholders. Now that they realize that they are behind, instead of cutting dividends to fund their R&D they are getting the US taxpayers to fund it.
I wonder how big the lobbying contributions were to get this bill passed?
The US - the county with the best government money can buy!!!
This is just the Senate bill - very pro big business and anti China. The House can pass it, pass a similar bill, or decide it's already part of the infrastructure bill that they already passed. Regardless, the final bill will have more constraints.
Still, most of the $52b subsides will go to big business because they're just not many small businesses doing chip design and fabrication.
Its not just the facilities, you need the people to staff them. Lost in all this noise is that we've had serious and ongoing problems with finding suitably qualified (and experienced) people for 15-20 years and the pace of retirement of key workers is increasing. We have a shortage of suitable entry level people. This can be traced back to a problem with the educational system and a plethora of choices for newly qualified people. Our educational system is still geared to mass production -- large class sizes, 'one size fits all' curricula -- and non-subject qualified teachers (that's teachers that have a credential but they don't have a degree in the subject they're teaching). (Its really difficult to graduate high school in the US with significant education in math or physics, there's neither time nor teachers. Far easier to go for law or administration....)
Even iof you could change the schools overnight then you'd have a lag while things are organized, students prepared and college courses set up to receive them. Then there's a further lag while the college students graduate, followed by another lag while the graduate entry learn the ropes (no, you don't learn this sort of thing in a class). So what you need is a sustained investment in the entire system, not a one off 'flash in the pan' jolt which more likely than not is going to feather some corporate nests and the rest will still end up overseas (give or take a headline project or two -- UK readers will know the drill, "A Dozen Jobs Created"....).
The biggest challenge China offers us is that its turning out some 35,000 engineers a year at the moment. I suppose we could import some but I think that for the same job they'll earn similar or better money locally (seriously), they won't be playing roulette with a visa system that blows hot and cold depending on Congress's obsession du jour -- and who wants to live in Phoenix, anyway? (The Chinese like to buy west coast real estate but its not to live in, its an investment. The PRC government's clamped down on this recently.)