The Biden-Harris administration’s big bet on Intel Corp. to lead a US chipmaking renaissance is in grave trouble as a result of the company’s mounting financial struggles, creating a potentially damaging setback for the country’s most ambitious industrial policy in decades.
The funniest part about this debacle is that Intel used part of this subsidy to invest in Chinese AI companies and research because they’re ahead of the US lol
Indeed, and same with Nvidia as well. The US just cut off western companies from their biggest market, and now everybody is acting like it’s a mystery as to why these companies are in financial trouble. The whole chip sanctions on China scheme accomplished the exact opposite of what they intended. China is catching up with the west faster than anybody thought they could, meanwhile western chip industry is collapsing. What I expect we’ll see in the near future is that China will ramp up production of domestic chips and start competing with western companies on the global market as well which will put further pressure on them.
It would be especially funny if China and Taiwan decided to partner up
China is already the leader in basic chips. The US sanctions them on advanced chips, but even western economists and analysts say this doesn’t make sense because it makes up a tiny fraction of what’s available. Consumers and the military in the west already heavily rely on basic Chinese chips and can’t get cut off from these.
Bingo. You don’t need a 4.7 GHz 8 core consumer CPU to power a car and its associated data mining utilities, you need like forty microcontrollers and one smart lightbulb worth of wifi capacity.
Exactly, the main advantage of bleeding edge chips is that they work well for consumer mobile devices like phones, tablets, and laptops. For vast majority of other uses, it’s complete overkill. Like you don’t need a 2nm chip for your fridge or your coffee maker.
SMIC is filled with Taiwanese engineers that the company poached from TSMC by offering much more. China and Taiwan will never partner up diplomatically since China is threatening to take over Taiwan, obviously. Business-wise they’ve been cooperating since forever.
Taiwan os going to end asking China for a reunification after China outcompite them on the chip industry
Nvidia is going to sell cut down chips to China as they did with the latest generation of AI chips. Also their best stuff ends up there anyway through intermediaries. Intel is gonna be a zombie company. They can’t fab anything competitive and their designs aren’t anything industry leading.
Thing is that China is already starting to produce their own chips of the same calibre, so Nvidia won’t be selling cut down chips to China for much longer. And yeah, Intel is basically dead because Apple showed that the whole x86 architecture is basically legacy design. RISC and SoC architectures are the future.