this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2023
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You’d think big hitters in the tech world who need these chips would make this happen. Companies like Apple for example.
I find it hard to believe that the US has an insufficient pool of talent available for this project. These companies just don't want to pay what those qualified individuals demand in compensation.
Why would you believe this? The talent is specialized and most of them are already employed by the few dominant market players.
I agree with what you said, but why would the US have fewer available qualified individuals than Taiwan? We have a large population and an effective university system. I think its likely that the talent is available, but expensive.
Skilled labor isn't about having an effective University system.
It's about having a large number of people with the experience in the sector. A sector the US largely doesn't have. So the talent pool is very small across the entire country, never mind just Arizona.
Building microchips is really hard and Taiwan has held a practical monopoly on the industry for a while now. It’s not that the US doesn’t have educated workers, but it wouldn’t surprise me that it is hard to find many qualified to build the actual facilities to manufacture microchips - most of the US’s involvement in microchips has been designing them and then handing those designs over to Taiwan for manufacturing.
Taiwan literally had a government intervention to launch TSMCcand developed their university system around TSMC being the crown jewel of employment, while the US has had dysfunctional support for anything STEM that succeeds in spite of itself.
It's a small unionized labor pool. One that is already being employed to build a new fab by Intel right now. TSMC just doesn't want to deal with reality.
Lol US has draconian immigration rules and it’s hard to “force train” people to become qualified enough.