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this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2024
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Amazon is fabless for their chip design unit, there all little mini design units for shit like datacenters.
It's hilarious you're saying that because Intel labelled itself an investor in USA foundry projects you think they are exempt from this. Okay man, go work at the plants in Ohio and Arizona. Oh wait, they don't fucking exist bruh
Intel, Ti and IBM all made chips before pure-play and fabless were even a thing, and are still doing so. Intel has 16 fabs in the US, Ti 8, IBM... oh, they sold their shit, I thought they still had some specialised stuff for their mainframes. Well, whatever.
Of all companies, the likes of Amazon and Google not fabbing their own chips should hardly be surprising. They're data centre operators, they don't even sell chips, if they set up fabs they'd have to start doing that, or compete with TSMC to not have idle capacity standing around costing tons of money. A fab is not like a canteen which you can expect to actually be in use all the time so there's going to be no need to compete in the restaurant business to make it work.
And that's only really looking at logic chips, e.g. Micron also has fabs at home in the US.
None of those companies even make a blip on global chip production though. Are they for research or something? Why should I give a shit about a tiny technically existing fraction of production that will never expand?
Go look at where there has been actual foundry production for decades. None of the companies you mentioned even exist in foundry. Who cares if they have A facility or two? That's just part of figuring out what they're going to order from TSMC.
Neither does TSMC, high end chips is just a tiny part of the number of chips (albeit an important and lucrative part of the market).
TSMC is alone at the top is because it's so damn expensive and the market is not that big, there's basically no place for a competitor. Anyone trying to dethrone them has to have very deep pockets and a good reason not to simply buy from TSMC. The Chinese might be able to pull it off, they have the money and a good reason.