The Chip War comes home
NPP Pressroom
Business Insider
Taylor Dorrell
01/19/2023
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Even if the massive investments in bringing chip production home help to grow America's domestic semiconductor industry, the US will still have to rely on other countries to complete the manufacturing process. Assembly and packaging will still be shipped abroad, and the technology being manufactured in these plants will be years behind the advanced chips that Taiwan can produce. In the meantime, companies like Intel and TSMC will enjoy billions of dollars in incentives as part of the chip war.
It begs the question whether the onshoring of tech manufacturing can be done sustainably and equitably — without displacing, defunding, or diverting the funds that the most vulnerable and essential workers need. If there's a way to bring back jobs while securing funds for schools and not jeopardizing communities' water supply, it's still up for debate. What is clear is that, as Ashik Siddique, a research analyst for the Institute for Policy Studies, wrote, the bipartisan support for onshoring chip manufacturing "shows that getting an edge over China is apparently our government's most urgent priority."