For fucks sakes. Germany is giving out $5 BILLION in corporate welfare to a company that is worth almost $1/2 TRILLION dollars.
This is how companies are playing us. Cities try to outbid another one in giving these corporations money hand-over-fist.
I fear it’s a necessary to spend money to ensure German and by extent European independence from China should they decide to increase the pressure on Taiwan.
We have to spend money to get the expertise and the tooling up and running. Preferably yesterday. How do you propose we do it quicker or cheaper?
There is nothing fast or cheap about bleeding edge chip manufacturing, and simply having a Taiwanese company’s factory in your country doesn’t mean that your country has the expertise in that industry. There are going to be trade secrets that never leave the walls of TSMC’s offices. And with how automated many of these high end factories are, a local workforce isn’t gaining enough expertise to leverage what they learn and break out on their own (just as an example).
If you really want to be a player in that field, you invest in home-grown solutions - universities which research the bleeding edge of chip production, German-based companies with their own production. It isn’t easy. None of this is, but the $5B that Germany is spending on this deal might have gone a long ways in at least starting some of these other things going. They could have tried to partner with Siemens or Bosch or other similar high tech giant to start a chip division.
The US government does something sort of like this with it’s DARPA competitions, as well as when partnering with NASA or the DoD.
I am not saying that governments shouldn’t partner with companies to invest in new plants, but damn is $5B a ton of money and I always feel like these companies are playing us for suckers for essentially funding their risks without giving us any of their profits.
In this case it’s the economic incomtetence of the German administration though. German economy is hurting extremely without any good outlook and they hope to solve their problems by throwing billions at foreign mega-corps instead of investing in infrastructure, reducing bureaucracy and taxes.
