If Intel is critical to the US industrial base, why aren't Nvidia and Apple stepping up to support Intel? What is the point of $3T national champions like Apple and Nvidia if they ship the industrial base overseas.
Microsoft bought Apple shares for their own benefit instead of for supporting a competitor (it was too cheap for them and they could argue not a monpoly).
Intel's foundry business is unsuitable for NVIDIA to use to produce GPUs. Intel's foundry business is also not a complement in the economics sense, as in "commoditize your complement"; it's a substitute for TSMC fabs (but a bad substitute). The market impact of Intel's foundry business is that incremental improvements to the fabs used more or less exclusively for Intel's x86 CPUs does not lead to higher sales of NVIDIA GPUs. It would take an unrealistically huge advance in quality or drop in price for Intel's fabs and the output thereof to affect demand for NVIDIA GPUs.
That would be an argument for splitting Intel into two, the contract fab business and the design business. It's tough to make a partnership with Intel to fab your chip design if their other arm is competing with you on the same thing. Intel's process is tailored to their own designs which make it hard for outsiders to optimize. So, it's not only risky from a business perspective to make Intel your manufacturing partner, it's also more difficult than the alternatives.
Imho it's pretty likely that this will happen. Intel's IP will be sold off, while their manufacturing business remain, both due to the geopolitical situation and because although they have seen setbacks in recent years, they are still damn good at making chips.
They are not _the best_ at making chips -- sure. But don't get it twisted, they are damn good at making chips. There are only 3 companies out there who are even in this race; Intel is still one of them.
Nvidia and Apple are international megacorporations, not national champions. Companies that do business and have shareholders all around the world tend to detach themselves from national concerns, as those are not in their interests. And they always keep the option to move their headquarters open, in case something goes wrong in their home country.
This effect is more obvious in small countries, but large ones are not immune to it either, especially if their fortunes turn.
Microsoft spent peanuts (for them) on Apple stock in the 90s. Saving Intel will take much more than that for anyone.
Not to mention that Apple had atleast a salvageable IP if done well. Nobody else could compete with them on shipping MacOS machines. Intel has no such moat.
TFA says companies have an incentive for intel to succeed so they're not all reliant on TSMC.
Apple used to dual-source their chips from Samsung/TSMC before they went all in with TSMC, but it's clear they're now vulnerable to geopolitical tensions.
> TFA says companies have an incentive for intel to succeed so they're not all reliant on TSMC.
Kind of. If Intel keep making shit, it doesn't help anyone if they succeed doing it. They are nothing making products that are a viable alternative to TSMC, so it makes no difference if they vanish.
Apple and Nvidia are where they are today in part because of their use of the best fabs. If you force them to use Intel, their edge will erode and they will no longer be $3T national champions.
GF sold its EUV machine several years ago when it decided to stop trying to compete at the leading edge of logic processes.
So, they're not comparable to what TSMC, Intel and Samsung are doing.
They're not in a position to grind out the AI supercomputers of today's excitement. Those aren't the chips I'm worried about from a national security perspective.
It's the microcontrollers and FPGAs controlling weapons systems that really should be made within the country boundaries and that should be completely fine on GF's machinery.
I suppose there are multiple reasons why saving Intel might be important. Making chips used for defence seems the most persuasive one to me.
There's been a continual drive towards better semiconductor processes. That's really important for things like GPU compute. I think we're past diminishing returns for a lot of other things. There's probably a ~14nm arm chip in the keyboard I'm typing on that's only there because it was the cheapest option. Does the ECU in a car benefit from being sub 7nm? Maybe, probably not by much.
The ECU in your car doesn't benefit much from newer processes, but the chips required for self-driving do.
That's the special thing about leading semiconductors: they enable other technologies.
From the personal computer to IoT and AI, all of these were at some point enabled by advances in semiconductor scaling.
You're only focused on what leading edge nodes provide today, but they enable much more than just speculative AI hyperscaling in the long term.
