[ExI] 18,000 Reasons It’s So Hard to Build a Chip Factory in America

[John Clark]

On Fri, Dec 5, 2025 at 4:53 PM spike jones via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

*> **Darin do let me assure you: the USA needs domestic chip fab
> capability.*


*I certainly agree with you, that's why I bought some Intel stock several
years ago, at the time it was the only US company that was capable of
making cutting edge computer chips. However that turned out to be a poor
investment because I forgot that what the US needs is not necessarily what
the US will get. Today no US company is capable of making cutting edge
computer chips. I wish like hell I had bought TSMC stock back then instead
of Intel. *

*More recently I did buy some TSMC but I didn't sell my Intel because maybe
they can turn things around, and I remembered what Warren Buffett said
about TSMC,  "It's the leader in a great fast growing industry and is
probably the best managed company in the world, but I don't own any of its
stock because I don't like the its geography" . I figure if China invades
Taiwan the world will suffer but Intel will benefit, and if they don't then
TSMC will thrive regardless of which software company makes the smartest
AI.    *

*> I consider that in the top three current investment opportunities.*


*I think that would be TSMC, ASML and Nvidia. The people that make the most
money in a gold rush are not the miners, it's the people that sell the pics
and shovels. I think investing in hardware is far less risky than investing
in software because it's more predictable.  It's possible that some small
little known software company could make a breakthrough and produce an AI
that leaves Claude, Grok, GPT and Gemini in the dust, but it's far less
likely that a small hardware company could do something similar.  *

*John K Clark*
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