Apple Chip Supplier TSMC Celebrates Arizona Factory Nearing Completion

[huge_apple_fangirl]

Too late for that!

Intel Cuts Fab Buildout by $4B To Pay Billions In Dividends – First Net Loss In Over 30 Years, Cutting Fab Buildouts, But “Committed To Growing The Dividend”

Source

We don’t know that they cut capex because of CHIPS (there’s about to be a glut of supply soon) and cutting the dividend would freak out investors (the benefit of buybacks over dividends is that they can be stopped at any time, and Intel did stop buybacks). Plus with inflation the dividend may not have been raised in real terms. But I agree that this is a bad look. If the US really believes that Intel is too big to fail because of national security, they should buy a controlling stake in Intel and then force them to build fabs in the US, not hand them a blank check from taxpayers and hope that they do the right thing.

 

[bassexpander]

Exactly - came to the forums to post the same thing. This is the big elephant in the room. These fabs use an obscene amount of water. There may have been some very good incentives to build the plant there, but they should have looked beyond that and more closely at the long term viability. I'm all for a healthy foundry capability in the US, but putting it in Arizona was just dumb. Also, I suspect we'll have to more strongly invest in the education of the next generation of process engineers to drive all the R&D necessary to stay on the bleeding edge. And I wonder what happens when the China/Taiwan situation hits the fan...

Shhhh… we have an election on the way.

 

[0924487]

Notice the people in the photo op are all White?

 

[iluvcrap2000]

deleted

 

[0924487]

Not if they’re smart. The US bill requires unions and union wages.

It's fine, they can automate 99% of the stuff, hire only Professional Engineers that are paid really well to begin with. They can just contract out the cleaning, landscaping, etc.

 

[0924487]

I'm not sure the capacity of this single plant, but it is relatively small in the overall production supply.

China, in response to the worldwide chip shortage (along with recent US sanction activity) is building 31 of these factories in 4 years. That is just *new supply* to say nothing of the number of plants already in production worldwide.

MoA - Exclusions And Sanctions Help 'Enemies' To Build Their Own Capabilities

That would make sense because China is the world's largest chip market.

 

[0924487]

A multibillion dollar company and they can't even use Google Translate? The sign in Spanish has grammatical errors.

100% of holywood movies that feature the Chinese languge either have major errors or are simply gibberish. So, it's fine. Non-English languages in the US are just there for symbolic decoration.

 

[aapl owner]

It’ll be interesting to see how they can come up with tens of thousands of engineers that will not want to unionize in the USA. I suppose they can just bring in thousands of foreign workers on visas.

Based on your comment it appears you have no idea how a large semiconductor plant even operates. Ignorance is bliss.

 

[aapl owner]

The vast majority of that will go to Intel & their executive bonuses. Heck Pat Gelsinger was almost begging for it.

Another comment from someone who knows nothing about the subject they commented on.

 

[citysnaps]

Sadly this will go the same way as of the sapphire project, it’ll be a complete disaster and money wasted.

How will money be wasted?

 

[stockseer]

Great! More factories, in more countries and different locations is fundamental for guaranteeing supply in case of geopolitical, military and/or environmental/natural disaster crisis. Hope we will see one of these facilities in Europe soon as well.

Based on what ON is doing with AEHR Test Systems; I suspect you will see more in EU. And you have Orlando's tiny LightPath with a Quantum Computing deal in Israel that is even backed by the State of Florida and I think NASA (due to low-earth orbit deals they're doing with SpaceX).

 

[AF_APPLETALK]

The thing I can't figure out is why in the hell they would put this in Arizona, when the entire SW region is going through a megadrought. Did they not consult some geologists during site selection?

 

[George Dawes]

I can’t see any downsides to this , Steve always wanted everything in house , this is a giant step forward

Now get robot automated factories in the USA 🇺🇸 for everything else

 

[incoherent_1]

You really have to step back in amazement at the juggernaut that Tawian has become in the semiconductor industry.

 

[Rigby]

Intel lost half a billion this quarter- the CHIPS Act is functionally a bailout.

What nonsense. The CPU business (both client and data center) made solid profits, and so did the networking division and Mobileye. The loss is almost exclusively caused by the GPU division which is really a sideshow for Intel and in the middle of introducing new products. Intel could have easily reported an overall profit by lowering dividend payouts. And all this is amid the billions of investments they are making into their new fabs. Say about Intel what you want, they still make massive amounts of revenue and have a healthy balance sheet.

 

[bushman4]

TSMC is way ahead of the game and realizes that Taiwan is a risky place to do business in

 

[davidjytang]

Taiwanese here. We regard TSMC and Foxconn as high tech manufacturers of different leagues. I’m glad TSMC venture comes to fruition as expected. Foxconn, on the other hand, are regarded as a cunning company with a cunning CEO. His words are not entirely reliable.