How is that not even worse?

...no? Did you see me say nobody would buy the assets in a scenario where Intel was actually going bankrupt?

I said if by some magic Intel ceased to exist tomorrow, there wouldn't be some startup just filling the gap. So the idea that government investment in Intel somehow prevents a startup competitor is just nonsense. To compete with Intel would require trillions in investment and probably a decade+ of time to build the requisite organization and talent.

The government investment to prevent the catastrophe that would result in them declaring bankruptcy and the subsequent breakup of their assets has no bearing on whether or not a startup could replace them.

> But I guess trying to nationalize companies and "benefiting" from company profits was something people were missing. How did no one see that? Ah yes, third world countries try this routinely for "national security" and it always leads to moral hazard pointed out by the person above you.

This isn't nationalizing it though, this is just an investment into it. Investments aren't bad.

Not that I agree with bail-outs, but 2008 financial crisis that resulted in a number of bail outs actually netted the treasury a profit.

> In total, U.S. government economic bailouts related to the 2008 financial crisis had federal outflows (expenditures, loans, and investments) of $633.6 billion and inflows (funds returned to the Treasury as interest, dividends, fees, or stock warrant repurchases) of $754.8 billion, for a net profit of $121 billion

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troubled_Asset_Relief_Program

Profits from the stake lower taxes that would otherwise be levied on you? Of course that’s moot if the deficit isn’t something being taken seriously.

> they sold ownership at market rate

No, they did not. The government paid less than Softbank that also just purchased a stake. Unless forced, Intel could have likely gotten a better deal.

You’re proposing that the United States government force Apple to invest in Intel? Apple chose a different supplier than Intel; at this point it’s hard to consider Intel a competitor to TSMC but let’s pretend they are.

You have proposed a “free market” system in which if you choose the wrong competitor you can be forced to bail out the chosen one. The economics of that don’t work at all.

If TSMC diseaper tomorrow, people will still buy computers, with chips made from Korea, or China, who cares. What are apple or Nvidia risking? They have worked hard to lock their customer. The problem is for the US military.

I'd rather the citizens control the companies than the other way around.

You can't build a new Intel. That would take decades. These aren't startups. They are massive fucking machines that can't just be disassembled and put back together by someone else. So the idea is to control them and get them back on track to better serve the collective interest.

They did it with rail before

US needed functional railroads and they took over the rr companies.

> We can definitely offer subsidies for manufacturing in the US

The very subsidies Intel now has to pay with shares for? How is that a subsidy? Companies now and in the future would be very concerned before taking any US subsidies because the terms can always change after the fact.

And it’s still owned by a foreign country and Taiwan is restricting TSMC from manufacturing their most advanced processors from being manufactured in the US.

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/ta...

[dead]

Right it would make a lot more sense to let this happen and then restrict that the buyers be American (or European, I guess).

No amount of money is going to create a new fab in a reasonable timeframe.

You can buy one, if a suitable one exists, but there isn’t spare stock sitting around; the lead time is long, especially for high end nodes.

If Taiwan becomes practically inaccessible, is there any way another country can setup a competing fab (for the latest generation of chip sizes) without years of R&D? As far as I understand, the practical knowledge of how to do it doesn't exist right now. (Neither does the prerequisite tooling)

What is the risk for Nvidia if TSMC diseaper? Wouldn't they simply switch supplier and pick the second best option?

I’d love this to be true but the tech involved is Sci-fi level stuff. Neutron beams used to chop off atomically perfect slices of giant silicon crystals and wacky stuff like that.

TBF garage fabs -are- a thing but it’s in the hundreds of nanometers scale. Thin film technology is also promising for low tech tape outs, but neither of those is going to be practical for anything better than 1980/90s tech. A modern die would be in the square meters range on those process densities, and could never achieve ghz speeds.

That said, there are a ton of scrappy companies sending out designs to 30-100nm scale fabs, companies with 5-10 employees cranking out cool designs and custom silicon… but they are still sending their tape-outs to giant companies to fab, just on their old, obsolete machines.

Silicon foundries are incredibly capital intensive, and short SOTA process lifespans burn through that investment at a frantic pace.

I think one of the people who got closest to that was Sam Zeloof.

He kind of had everything going: extremely clever and motivated, cooperation with his parents (who also worked in the industry), access to equipment. Kind of hard to improve on that.

He was able to replicate most of Intel's SOTA process... from 50 years ago. That's more than almost everyone else has managed in their garage but that's about the best you can expect without insane capex and ramp up (and again, it's not like he didn't have access to capital, it just wasn't monetary.) Even still it took five or so years to work everything out.

The SOTA today is really kind of insane. It's right at the frontier of what all of humanity is capable of. Of course as time goes on we'll push that out and today's SOTA is tomorrow's commodity but that won't change everyone's concern with being unable to replicate the contemporary best process.

The reality is all our "defense" needs (and arguably most other needs too) are far more than adequately met with processes a decade old now. It's really not the big deal everyone makes it out to be.

Sadly no. There isn't really a single person who understands the entire SOTA chip fabrication process in enough detail. Think thousands of material science PhDs with master and apprentice style relationships inserted at every level of a massive tech tree.

It's not like you can just look at the plans for a chip fab and copy/paste it into a new location and hire people to fill in who will have any idea how to work it.

There is no such thing as a “smallish” chip manufacturer that can manufacture leading edge chips. It’s about scale.

If it were that easy, Apple, Amazon, Google AMD, Nvidia, etc who all design their own chips would have done it.

It is not a straw man.

There is no amount of scrappy cleverness that gets you from zero to manufacturing cutting-edge chips without shitloads of capital investment, years/decades of R&D, a huge manufacturing workforce, and big contracts.

There's no such thing as starting small and scaling in that business.

> in a move that was later declared illegal

To be fair, a lower court ruled it “illegal exaction” but awarded $0 in damages as the illegal exaction prevented bankruptcy which would have zeroed out the investment anyways. Then the Federal Court of Appeals tossed that ruling as the plaintiffs did not have standing to pursue action.

There is no current ruling that the acquisition was illegal.

No collective action is needed. They can just refuse to fund the stadium if they can't get a good deal for themselves on it. But maybe the people living there really want the stadium despite the risks, so in that case it's fine. They're getting what they want.

Oh, Apple definitely has problems but putting $50B into Intel doesn’t sound like a good idea.

“Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.”

I’d encourage you to “read again” the HN guidelines.

> Government shouldn't bail out anyone. Period. It should enact preferential policies like grants, tax cuts, subsidies etc. for industries they want to promote.

If Intel is at risk of going under, saving it is what’s understood to be “bailing out.” A grant that’s meant to save a major multi-billion dollar company isn’t quite what most people think of as a grant.

Are you unfamiliar with the concept of cornering a market? Sure, uber was offering lower prices subsidized by VCs until taxis were driven off. After the fact they raised prices back up. Or what Amazon did with diapers.com? It is not wise to let your geopolitical foe gut the productive capability of your economy. It’s how America took over dominance from the UK by taking over the high tech business of the day back then (textiles).

It’s fine for the consumer in the short term but a flawed long term strategy.

Not a serious problem in the same sense that a military conflict would be. Different categories and different concerns.

The US is not “collapsing” and we have plenty of social services.

Our lifespan is lower because we’re fat.

It's the same line of thought that says countries should subsidize local agriculture. The alternative would be greater specialization in food production and greater risks if those specialized countries fail to provide for their dependants. No doubt there's some influence of farmers trying to get wealth transferred to themselves but that doesn't mean it doesn't also benefit the rest of the population.

Just one instance.

https://fedscoop.com/problem-project-threatens-progress-soci...

> The program, called the Disability Case Processing System, or DCPS, was designed to improve case processing and enhance customer service. But six years and $288 million later the program has “delivered limited functionality and faced schedule delays as well as increasing stakeholder concerns

For the main system they're still using COBOL, which has no Date data type, causing issues even in 2025.

I switched away from AT&T. You even keep your number. Switching govt services not an option unless you take more extreme measures.

> USPS has also been great overall

USPS is an independent agency which is funded by its own fees charged to users, not taxpayer money. It's not like the other agencies.

From Wiki:

> The USPS is often mistaken for a state-owned enterprise or government-owned corporation (e.g., Amtrak) because it operates much like a business

It's also far from a monopoly unlike most other govt agencies and has competition in the form of UPS, Fedex, DHL, Amazon etc.

So it's not surprising that it runs better, if it loses user fees, it directly affects the bottomline and thus would have to downsize, no blank check from the taxpayer like other agencies have.

If it was a company it'd have failed already.

> The program, called the Disability Case Processing System, or DCPS, was designed to improve case processing and enhance customer service. But six years and $288 million later the program has “delivered limited functionality and faced schedule delays as well as increasing stakeholder concerns

https://fedscoop.com/problem-project-threatens-progress-soci...

And that's just one instance.

Can you imagine raising $288 million from VCs for a software application while delivering so little?

But taxpayer money? Free and easy money to keep wasting coz no one cares. Tragedy of the commons.

For the main system they're also using COBOL, which has no Date data type, causing issues even in 2025.