US CHIPS Act set to electrify semiconductor scene with billions

The US government has dropped details on its National Strategy on Microelectronics Research, outlining top goals and actions for the next five years to boost the semiconductor industry with CHIPS Act investment. Published by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), the document [PDF] outlines four main …

[cyberdemon]

There's no such thing as silicon heaven..

But then where would all the calculators go?

[bombastic bob]

Re: There's no such thing as silicon heaven..

Electric Sheep-land

[Yorick Hunt]

Plenty of money going to the executives, and just enough to muddy the waters going into development/production.

Same old, same old.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Well if the tax payer's money went into the plant infrastructure that would be central planning and before you know it we would be waving red banners and putting ex-presidents in glass boxes

[martinusher]

Just pouring bucketloads of cash (which we don't have)(not that will stop us) into the usual suspects isn't going to change anything. It will end up in endless management, bonuses all around and stock buybacks. We know this because its been done before numerous times, both here and elsewhere.

The problem has taken decades to build up and is endemic in the way we operate business. Boeing should be a headline example here -- a giant, well run engineering company with a boat load of cashflow gets taken over by professional managers -- money people -- who proceed to strip and divest and (naturally) squeeze investment in order to boost profits and so share prices. Any glitches in this process are covered by a well oiled PR machine and its evil twin, political lobbyists. These also serve to tamp down any competition because, as we all know, its a lot cheaper to buy politicians than it is to develop aircraft. The business runs on OK for a decade or two but eventually cracks form and start to be obvious. Since the business is "too big to fail" -- strategic -- it has to be propped up one way or another because by this time the 'core' is now too weak -- business units divested, infrastructure sold and leased back etc.** -- to remedy itself without massive investment that's most definitely not coming from Wall Street.

(**Sale and Leaseback is a common form of corporate asset stripping but I don't think Boeing has gone this particular route. But remember this is just a 'for instance'.)

So the problem is "How do you remedy a cancerous corporate culture that's unable to adequately compete without enforcing some kind of monopoly?" The way we've done this in the past is by the arrival of new markets and players that are able to overshadow the mighty corporate giants (e.g. IBM being reduced from 80% of the global computer market to ???). We can't do this that easily these days because a lot of the competition is foreign and can't be as easy intimidated as the Japanese were in the 1980s.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

"It will end up in endless management, bonuses all around and stock buybacks. "

Which will ultimately trickle down to the great unwashed masses for the general good of the economy

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

>Sale and Leaseback is a common form of corporate asset stripping but I don't think Boeing has gone this particular route.

Well they out-scourced their non-core activity of making airframes to a spun off subsidiary for a more economically efficient outcome - to the general benefit of almost(*) all concerned

(* ignoring the very small proportion of the company who might be actually flying on one of the economically assembled airframes)

[bombastic bob]

Remember Solyndra, the OBAKA admin's ginormous "Cluster-Feel" new/shiny solar tech funded by gummint?

I expect more of same, except with silicon chips this time.

[$$$M in gummint loans/grants/funds/etc. followed by squandering, looting, golden parachutes, and bankruptcy, just like before.]

[IGotOut]

Meanwhile in the UK...

Yes, we may give possibly some money to something with Self driving cars that are useless on UK roads but only if they use Blockchain, sorry ML and AI, whatever those are, to a GREAT BRITISH startup, well if they are in Shoreditch and my other half has shares in them, I think...., yes that should be good. We'll use the levelling up budget as Shoreditch is obviously more up north than Brighton, so yes, urrm..all good then?

Carry On