Brian J. Chen in the Boston Review:
The United States doesn’t really make chips these days, instead relying on a complex process of design, production, assembly, and testing that spans the globe. The vast majority of fabrication is done in East Asia; Taiwan, in particular, produces 41 percent of all processor chips and more than 90 percent of the most powerful chips, essential to advanced computing and AI. The supply chain’s concentration in an island nation with which China expressly seeks to “reunify” gives the whole matter unusually weighty stakes. At a White House event to get the bill past the finish line in Congress, Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks put it in terms bordering on thermonuclear: “Semiconductors—it’s not an overstatement to say—are the ground zero of our tech competition with China.”
While companies like Intel and Samsung are huge beneficiaries of the CHIPS Act, everyone understands that the major coup is getting the world’s number one chipmaker, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), to build its foundries on U.S. soil.
More here.
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