Posted on 05/14/2020 6:02:29 PM PDT by Candor7
Among other things, there is the fact that chip foundries create chips from silica. Silica is refined/extracted from sand.
What does Arizona have an awful lot of?
The business climate has a lot to do with it too.
What ever happened to those guys in I-da-ho [Micron?]
Due to a lot of brain drain and stupid decisions in the last couple decades, most commodity chips are not designed in the US but elsewhere. There are consequences when your universities are churning out mostly people with gender studies and underwater basket weaving degrees.
Micron’s still around and doing reasonably well. They’ve had some struggles in the last decade or so and no longer are able to produce all their products in North America - they’ve had to take some production to China to remain cost competitive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micron_Technology
The exodus from silicon valley started to AZ and NM. There is existing talent there with process engineers and technicians. Probably their universities have good eng programs.
Defense and aerospace contractors are big in AZ too.
Yes, but there’s not really enough to keep ahead of foreign competition in many cases. Lots of those engineers are older and not necessarily as creative as they formerly were.
Go look at the in house competition between Intel design departments that resulted in the Core-i line of processors. The US department designs were clearly inferior in each round of competition until Intel gave up and just let their Israeli studio deal with it. Also see what happened to Motorola/Freescale towards the end of their PowerPC production - same basic kind of thing, no new blood and the old engineers wouldn’t get radical.
Case in point: https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/made-in-israel-intel-launches-most-powerful-processor-yet-587698
C’mon AMD/Radeon, start building here. The only Team Red I support.
Why don’t we just offer to move all the Taiwanese and their factories here....many of them already speak some English....China can have the Island...we’ll get the tech and the Taiwanese people.....I’m being facetious of course...but Taiwanese corporations may need to consider a safe haven for their businesses and factories and their workers should China continue to speak aggressively about invading the Island. America might just be that backstop needed.
Taiwan has plants in ChiCom land.
That's my President.
We need to stop sourcing important materials and products to China.
It’s disgusting.
Ultimately, the most important stuff - food / health / security - needs to be sourced entirely domestically.
En route to that point, getting stuff out of the hands of China is a good start.
There are a lot of better countries to work with.
Apple’s investment in Texas is on the margins (Mac Pro). A $10,000,000,000 chip facility for 5nm production is a big thing. Yay! Arizona!
“In February 2019, the first microSD card with a storage capacity of 1 terabyte (TB) was announced by Micron.”
That’s pretty impressive.
What are you talking about?
I’m one of those 580 million enthusiasts. :)
Thx for article. Intel does production in Israel as well, despite Iran missiles.
May not take much to get them to source production fabs in AZ, NM, and Tx. Can get all the sand for polysilicon wafers easily but may need a pipeline for fresh water from processed Baja or Pacific water.
Not so marginal. Apple’s always had quite a lot of investment in Texas, a large campus in Austin since IIRC the 80s. They used to have a computer plant in Carrollton outside Dallas through the 1980s until the local neanderthal bible thumpers (as opposed to intelligent bible thumpers) screamed about how Apple employee health care plans allowed coverage of an unmarried partner (as they put it, “Living in sin with a woman”) and started making Carrollton very hostile to Apple. At the next opportunity they had, Apple axed the plant.
Remember kids, the enticements of China aren’t the only reason why industry leaves the US. Local idiots play a part too.
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