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.
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.