America will make at least quarter of advanced chips in 2032, compared to China’s 2% By 2032 America is projected to produce 28 percent of the world's most advanced processors while China will be making just two percent, or so the US Semiconductor Industry Association predicts. Those figures are in a study out this month that primarily focused on the impact of all that CHIPS Act funding and China's efforts to …
I suppose it depends what you mean by "advanced".
A lot of the most interesting developments at the cutting edge are smaller, less complex chips cleverly networked together, witness the story earlier about the SpiNNaker2. If we saw a massive switch in the industry between now and 2032 (which I think *very* likely) then I think a lot of the countries like China could stand to make some inroads.
… and just ship them to China, Vietnam, India, Malaysia, Mexico for product manufacturing and assembly with everything else made in the Far East Technology Supply Chain.
Much/most of that was fucked off to cheap Far East too.
My local instance of this, but Repeat for USA, Canada, Europe etc.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Glen
In semiconductors 'more' has always equated to 'better' simply because our software technology has failed to keep up -- we're still pretty much stuck with second generation software which needs brute force to overcome its numerous limitations. This is why you now need what was a decent sized supercomputer of a decade or so ago to just look at web pages. If you point this out to anyone then they just recite the mantra "Moore's Law" as its supposed to somehow fix the problem rather than just papering over the cracks, the reality being that power consumption and resulting thermal stress are not good for the environment or the long term reliability of systems (which, according to marketing, we're supposed to throw away regularly regardless of whether they're usable or not). I don't expect any software breakthroughs but should they occur it will knock the bottom out of the high performance microcircuit market -- they're too expensive, too fragile and too power hungry.
Anyway, experience in other technologies has repeatedly shown us that while the fattest individual profits are to be made from making a relative handful of 'the latest' the real money's in commodity. Who cares is China's "only making 2% of advanced chips" if they're making 98% of everything else?
1/ We need more because we want to achieve more. Whichever way you put it, intelligence, artificial or not, requires a lot of data. Look at the brain. After 4 billion years of optimization the trend is still towards the "more". More synapses, more specialization, higher proportion of myelinisation, more neurons, more dendrites, longer axons. Software is slow, hardware is fast.
2/ For advanced, what matter is price per transistor.
3/ For commodity chips, as per definition, manufacturing is more widespread and supply chain can be diversified. Differentiation is poor and competition is on price.
4/ Don't confuse volume and profit. In 2024, China has the highest volume of new homes and abysmal losses in the construction industry.
5/ Whichever domain you look at, progress in the advanced end of the difficulty spectrum makes the impossible possible, the difficult easy, and the easy trivial. Tailing leaders brings little reward and achieves little glory.
"In 2024, China has the highest volume of new homes and abysmal losses in the construction industry."
You don't know what you are talking about. Unlike the Western world, the government actually proceeded in clamping down on housing speculation by *not* bailing out promoters and speculators. Do you know that lots of those speculators were from the west? That's why they are so pissed and their media spread FUD in the hope to exacerbate the situation so that the Chinese government steps in to save everything. But that didn't happen. You can use whatever FUD qualifiers you want but it doesn't change the fact that it's notthing like the 2008/09 collapse in the US.
As for profit, it means nothing if that profit isn't reinvested properly (*cough* share buyback *cough*). Also, high profits often means the consumer got fleeced and lack of competition.
> This is why you now need what was a decent sized supercomputer of a decade or so ago to just look at web pages.
It's not just that. One of the big drivers of faster hardware is simply how much data we're moving around. Back in the late '70s and early '80s we had video chips with sprites and hardware scrolling and the like because the CPU just couldn't keep up with data movement required to, e.g., scroll an 8K or 16K frame buffer thirty times per second. Now we're playing 4K video (32 MB frame buffer) at 60 FPS, which requires moving around up to 2 gigabytes per second of data. (Generally much less, due to compression, but needing the CPU power to do the decompression helps make up for that.)
Despite all the talk of China, it looks like projected US growth is primarily at the expense of Taiwan and South Korea. I'm not sure those two countries are just going to sit there and take it, or whether they will come out with a response of their own.
Projected US growth is almost entirely in two areas, DRAM and logic < 10nm. With all the subsidies being thrown at the industry, I won't be surprised to see massive over capacity and bankruptcies in the DRAM business making those projections obsolete.
As for US growth in logic < 10nm, that seems to depend heavily on Intel being successful in making chips for third parties, something they haven't demonstrated much luck with so far. Given the fading relevance of x86, I wouldn't be willing to bet money on Intel still being in the chip making business in 2032, let alone a power there. They may very well decide to go fabless to avoid the high capital expenditure and associated financial risk.
The winners in 10 years time may be the countries that avoided throwing massive subsidies at the industry.
TSMC opens 1st Japan chip plant amid supply chain concerns kyodonews Feb 24, 2024
The US is still jawing with little visible action, while TSMCs first plant in Japan is already built and will start production this year.
The US problem is not subsidies per se, it is that institutional "legal" corruption prevents much of the government subsidies from reaching its intended target.
An industry association publishing some "report" cheerleading billions of subsidy to its industry. Duh!
You can write whatever fantasy you can think of for 2032. People can't remember what was promised or said a year ago, let alone 9-10 years in the future.
Did any of these so-called "experts" explain where we gonna find all the skilled workers willing to do the job?
China and India together have ~35.5% of earths population (~17% each). It is not a question of "if" China (or India), will produce advanced chips but "when", the numbers are on their side.
People with the potential skills required are not born in one country only. As a whole the potential is evenly distributed everywhere around the planet. Education can bring that potential to fruition. And opportunity to apply and maximize that potential is increasing everywhere over time.
US politicians because of their current policies towards highly educated immigrants, are in the long run shooting themselves in the foot. There was a constant flow of highly educated people leaving their home countries to chase after the American dream. This flow is a lot less than it once was.
China has invested strongly in education. The bunk of advanced academic papers that I have seen in recent years have been coming out of China, in the past it was predominately from the US.
I'm not saying that this is a good outcome, I'm just saying that this is the most probably outcome, eventually.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
