This is a special post for quick takes by Eli Tyre. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.
I'm mostly going to use this to crosspost links to my blog for less polished thoughts, Musings and Rough Drafts.
So it seems like one way that the world could go is:
China develops a domestic semiconductor fab industry that's not at the cutting edge, but close, so that it's less dependent on Taiwan's TSMC
China invades Taiwan, destroying TSMC, ending up with a compute advantage over the US, which translates into a military advantage
(which might or might not actually be leveraged in a hot war).
I could imagine China building a competent domestic chip industry. China seems more determined to do that than the US is.
Though notably, China is not on track to do that currently. It's not anywhere close to it's goal producing 70% it's chips, by 2025.
And if the US was serious about building a domestic cutting-edge chip industry again, could it? I basically don't think that American work culture can keep up with Taiwanese/TSMC work culture, in this super-competitive industry.
TSMC is building fabs in the US, but from what I hear, they're not going well.
(While TSMC is a Taiwanese company, having a large fraction of TSMC fabs in in the US would preement the scenario above. TSMC fabs in the US counts as "a domestic US chip industry.")
Building and running leading node fabs is just a really really hard thing to do.
I guess the most likely status scenario is the continuation of the status quo where China and the US continue to both awkwardly depend on TSMC's chips for crucial military and economic AI tech.
No clue if true, but even if true, but DARPA is not at all a comparable to Intel. Entity set up for very different purposes and engaging in very different patterns of capital investment.
Also very unclear to me why R&D is relevant bucket. Presumably buying GPUs is either capex or if rented, is recognized under a different opex bucket (for secure cloud services) than R&D ?
My claim isn't that the USG is like running its own research and fabs at equivalent levels of capability to Intel or TSMC. It's just that if a war starts, it has access to plenty of GPUs through its own capacity and its ability to mandate borrowing of hardware at scale from the private sector.
2Eli Tyre
I'm not claiming they're 10 years behind. My understanding from talking with people is that TSMC is around 2 to 3 years behind TSMC. My claim is that Samsung and TSMC are advancing at ~the same rate, so Samsung can't close that 2 to 3 year gap.
I'm mostly going to use this to crosspost links to my blog for less polished thoughts, Musings and Rough Drafts.