> "in any meaningful capacity"

Building a factory is one thing, they can have 50 of them built, but that doesn't mean much if all 50 together amount to like 0.1% of the company's output.

Once those factories scale up to 1-2%, then we can start considering that they've actually built a domestic supply, but that's a whole different goal than simply building the factories. Building factories is trivial. Making them output something is also "trivial". Scaling that up to a meaningful amount is a whole different, much harder goal to accomplish.

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direwolf20 19 hours ago | parent [-]

Are you sure? I'd think producing any RAM chips at all is much harder than scaling up a working production process.

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input_sh 15 hours ago | parent [-]

Yes, I'm pretty confident you don't know anything about manufacturing at scale.

Say you use a magic wand and build 15 new state-of-the-art factories tomorrow. Who's gonna run them? Does any location in the US have enough qualified workers that can simply take over and produce RAM in them from day 1 with no major fuckups?

No, you need a ton of time to teach thousands of people how to run those 15 factories. To even begin to teach people, you need to have 1 factory up and running. That 1 factory is at first going to be run by some of their existent workforce that they temporarily migrate from South Asia. Only then can they start to teach local populace how to run those factories on their own.

This is why it's much cheaper to simply build an additional one in South Asia than it is to build more than one in a whole new location. South Asia already has a bunch of workers that know what they're doing because they've been doing it for a long time. Build a new factory, promote some of your existent workforce up the chain, fill the lowest positions with fresh graduates that are gonna be equally good every year and you're good to go. It's nowhere near that simple in a brand new location, where even the most optimistic scenario would take longer than a decade to produce a meaningful amount of output.

	▲	subw00f an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Wow, so it's almost like the workers are a key piece in producing any value at all.