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China Plans $47 Billion Fund To Boost Its Semiconductor Industry (wsj.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal: In a move that could further heighten tensions with the U.S., China is poised to announce a new fund of about $47.4 billion (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source) to spur development of its semiconductor industry as it seeks to close the technology gap with the U.S. and other rivals, according to people familiar with the matter. The new war chest by the government-backed China Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund Co. follows a similar fund launched in 2014 that raised $21.8 billion, largely funded by central and local government-backed enterprises and industry players. Among other efforts, the fund would be used to improve China's ability to design and manufacture advanced microprocessors and graphic-processing units, one of the people said. Specific details including the amount could change, another person said.
one bubble to the next in china, all with public funds.
They will fund the US semi conductor industry with 40 billion dollars and fund 7 billion dollars in the 701st Cyber Warrior Division, The Red Weasels, to steal the secrets from those companies.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Comment removed based on user account deletion
That's how a good part of the world feels of the USA too. China has its problems, I'm not sure they are significantly worse than the American problems though. And yes, I have been to both places, China for a month, US a lot more than that, several times.
There's a Party in the States, and although it pretends to be a multitude of (2?) Voices, the truth is that its will is as total as the will of the CP in China. It's not quite as bad in the rest of the developed world.
Actually, the last election suggested that more Americans are fed up with income inequality and poor or no access to healthcare. Teachers in deeply red states are moving to the left politically because they see what the conservative politician is doing to their income. They're finally seeing that the right is the wolf in sheep's clothing. Most Americans confuse socialism with communism because they've been indoctrinated by the right. In reality, more socialist policies are good for the middle and lower classes. They're not so good for the wealthy. If you want to fix America, start really manufacturing here and stop the tide towards a service economy. Third world countries are largely service economies.
I don't know the first thing about manufacturing computing hardware. Now I see why, Chinese students have stolen all my knowledge.
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Ignoring that this whole argument is just a thinly veiled slight at the US (and it completely ignores where most of the US economy's spending actually goes, including the fact that most of the world is utterly and hopelessly dependent upon US developed non-weapons technology) I really don't think weapons are a poor choice of investment. At least in the case of weapons, you have a practical use for research and development for the more expensive of technologies, and what's more, you have a discriminator for bad technologies built-in. Just throwing money into the industry and hoping that something awesome will happen is less effective. Europe has been doing it for decades and they've still fallen well behind the US private sector, which has to rise or fall on its own merits.
The problem here is that the rhetoric is required for politicians to get elected. It would seem logical for politicians to move towards the center because they try to cater to voters on the other side of their fence, knowing that they will get the votes from their side anyway, but that doesn't take primaries into account. Primaries mean that only the most radical and most insane ones actually have a chance to run for an office because in primaries, you will primarily see the fringe voters go to support "their" candidate.
And then you're sitting in an election with two complete lunatics to choose from, so you pick the one that is at least not as completely insane as the other one.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Christian de Castries, Dien Bien Phu, 1954
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
China is showing one of the positives that having tight control over the economy can have. If something needs to be done, it's done and there is zero debate. There's also no begging educational institutions and private companies to please comply...it's a top-down order.
Unless there was another world war at hand, something like this or any of the other investments China has made in the recent past could never happen in the US. There's too much infighting and zero initiative to get something massive done.
Like it or not, the Chinese system does have the ability to make massive changes with very little friction. When the financial crisis hit in 2008, the Chinese plowed money into infrastructure to basically offset the recession. At an even more macro level, they're using their control to effectively manufacture a middle class by moving people from the countryside to cities. These are things that we'd never get done in the US even if there were an imminent need.
Given that the cost of state-of-the-art fab is about $20 billion and that China is behind, a $47 billion investment is not a threat. EE times reports that by 2020 a state-of-the-art fab will cost about $20 billion and wikipedia says that TSMC predicts the same.
There is a reason why semiconductor giants such as ARM, Nvidia, AMD, Broadcom, Qualcomm and even super-rich Apple are fabless; State-of-the-art fabs are insanely hard. The successes here, such as Intel, have generations of accumulated in-house expertise and have spent decades attracting, training and retaining the best experts in the world. Not to mention the elusive engineering management culture necessary for that. Maybe it is impossible to enter at that level and you have to evolve your way there over decades.
So China needs to build a modern fab, but also fund the R&D to get to that point and fund development of modern CPU architectures so they have something to make. By the time China succeeds with all of that, if they can, they might be at least a generation behind.
Finally, it's not like the world would be made worse-off by increased state-of-the-art semiconductor manufacturing capacity. More better chips are a good thing.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population.
President Dwight Eisenhower