re: SpaceX and Intel to build a semiconductor fabrication plant in TX. Bye-bye Taiwan?

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that its going to take a long time for American workers to come up to speed.

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American workers:

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Steve Jobs’s vision that he will make telephones that people will use to manage almost every aspect of their lives.

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I sometimes strike up a conversation with three or four people looking at their phones and say "Ya know I went to Auburn many many years ago, there was a fella in engineering, I didnt know him but he said one day he would have billions of people bowing down their heads daily"....I look down at the phones and say his name is Tim Cook, runs Apple....and he has billions bowing down their heads. Usually gets quite the laugh.

I think people are forgetting that Musk has already spent billions on sourcing articulating servos for Optimus and now is setting up long term chip fabs to go with it.

In essence, he knows he has the initial design of Optimus figures out and now is investing in fabs that will provide the chips to make them move.

Funny enough, the issue for most of these robots is autonomous thinking, which musk wants to not solve by building a massive brain in Optimus, but instead use a 2 part system with basic stuff onboard and complex processing down via xAI and grok, through always on connectivity of starlink….

A chip fab is a great hedge. Best case he can source all needed chips at cost from the US and jump the line regarding production schedules for Optimus. Worst case he is a chip fab producing the same generic chips in mass for Intel.

There are so many steps in the process and china doesnt havr the engineers to accomplish that

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and losing Taiwan just makes you giddy, doesn't it?

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That's what you get from my post?

You are the dumbest person here

Go post some more about Jackson, MS as if anyone cares about that shithole

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Thanks Biden

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Yes thanks Biden for crapping your pants and delaying what Trump was doing in 2017 and should’ve been completed in 2022.
Thanks Biden for fricking it up so bad and increasing bullshite regulations to where we almost had to start the process over after 7 years.

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its going to take a long time for American workers to come up to speed.

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I disagree with this. I’m not going to go into my background but I can tell you with certainty that you can train workers to work in a fabrication line in under a year in foreign countries so it should be quicker here where the average iq is higher.

My take, and I had my hand in this industry, this will be very interesting and warrant following. The process of manufacturing semiconductor uses specialized lithography. Everyone remember all the trucks and cars that couldn't be delivered to dealers sitting in railroad, abandoned warehouse, and closed mall parking lots because the semiconductors needed to make them work had been gobbled up by electronic game systems manufacturers and other small device iOT manufacturers when large orders from the car manufacturers were canceled in panic because nobody was going to the office?

When they determined they had a problem and needed those semiconductors it was too late. Manufacturing of semiconductors was full. And nobody wanted to build new fabrication production lines because the designs used in cars then were large, old design 7 micron designs and NOBODY could economically justify building new fabs to make old designs, for which the demand wasn't there, anyway, except for old designs that were going away, anyway. Plus, anyone producing new semiconductors would have to design all new designs because the then current product designs were owned by the current producers and newer designs wouldn't help because the products that needed the old designs needed THOSE old designs. Anything newer would work only for newer designs and the cars sitting in lots were designed to use the old designs. It was like domino's falling one by one.

Today's modern semiconductors are using 2 micron designs. Each lithography machine costs hundreds of millions of dollars each. Precision machinery like this requires a team of highly skilled technicians. In South Korea workers skilled in this are commanding salaries that are incredibly high. The labor costs alone prevent new fab investments. The production of flat wafers used in production lags behind the industry as it struggles with obtaining the existing sources of rare earth materials, which China controls, or did control, or still controls but that control is slipping as new sources in the US and Canada have been found. Ukraine is another source of major deposits. Worth defending for that? Maybe for Europe as the huge majority of lithography production machines is built there.

But here in the US, we now have the source of rare earth materials to make the investment worthwhile. If, in this process, SpaceX and Intel are able to wrest away manufacturing of new AI designed and managed lithography machines and not count on production from Europe or Japan or South Korea or Taiwan, then it will be quite the incredible achievement to take away China's and Asia's dominant influence on global semiconductor strategy and production.

Colossus data center in Memphis was built in 122 days.