Why should the CHIPS bill be passed?

There's little to no incentive for these companies to invest in us manufacturing. Developing fabs elsewhere would likely meet less regulatory difficulty and have lower labor costs.

This CHIPS act is a necessary acknowledgement that something has to be done to onshore this production. Semiconductors are- from a national security level & beyond- one of the few absolutely critical must have industrial capacities, and the US- if it wants to have this capability- locally has to be willing to put up and shell out extra money to compensate & adjust for our costlier/uncompetitve economic environment.

Without the subsidies, companies have no reason to locate manufacturing where politicians want it located.

> Didn't Intel just commit to $35B to start factories in Europe? Why can't they do that here?

Intel got billions in exchange for doing that. So the reason they are setting up where they are in Europe is because the governments there paid Intel to locate there.

The issue is not so much that foundries can't afford it rather that the USA was dismayed to discover that most US based foundries have moved over seas creating a dependence they now think is a problem.

They want them back not just for jobs but also for national security reasons (as I understand it) and feel that the issue justifies the incentives. I think the issue is compounded by the fact that many countries have come to the same conclusion and foundries are not likely to build multi-billion dollar plants in each of them, so there is also scarcity in play.

The reason is that every other major country subsidises chip manufacture in some way or another, making the US undesirable. Last I read, China has subsidised fabs by upwards of 70%. Europe has followed suit with their new chip funding legislation. It doesn't make financial sense for a global company to fork out multiple billions if they can do cheaper elsewhere, ie, Intel's new fab in Germany.

Why not just tax imported chips as opposed to just giving a bunch of money away

Atlas shrugged a long time ago.

As a worker you would hate it if is you had to work longer to get paid the same amount of money.

Capitalists feel the same way, except they hate having to invest more money to make the same amount of money.

Everybody else in the world sees it as a big win when microchip manufacturing capacity improves because they don't have to pay for it. To Intel it's a disaster if they have to pay for it, they've got no interesting in paying for it because governments want it so bad that they'll pay for it.