Nathan Lambert
speaker
1,814 appearances
3 recordings
2 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard 1 Feb
Nathan Lambert’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Arizona would stop producing too, right? It's actually like pretty critical. One of the things I like to say is if I had like a few missiles, I know exactly where I could cause the most economic damage, right? It's not targeting the White House, right?
It's the R&D centers for TSMC, Intel, Samsung, and then some of the memory guys, Micron and Hynix.
And so TSMC, you cannot purchase a vehicle without TSMC chips, right? You cannot purchase a fridge without TSMC chips. I think one of the few things you can purchase, ironically, is a Texas Instruments graphing calculator, right? Because they actually manufacture in Texas. But outside of that, a laptop, a phone. It's depressing. Anything you, servers, right? GPUs, none of this stuff can exist.
And this is without, without TSMC. And in many cases, it's not even like the leading edge, you know, sexy five nanometer chip, three nanometer chip, two nanometer chip. Oftentimes it's just like some stupid power IC that's like converting from like, you know, some voltage to another, right? And it's made at TSMC, right?
So they do R&D on their own. They're just way behind, right? So I would say in 2015, China had a five-year plan where they defined by 2025 and 2020 certain goals, including 80% domestic production of semiconductors. Mm-hmm. They're not going to hit that, right, to be clear. But they are in certain areas really, really close, right?
Like BYD is probably going to be the first company in the world to not have to use TSMC for making, because they have their own FAPs, right, for making chips. Now, they still have to buy some chips from foreign, for example, like around like self-driving ADAS capabilities, because those are really high end. But at least like, you know, like an internal combustion engine has 40 chips and an EVE
just for controlling flow rates and all these things. And EVs are even more complicated. So all these different power ICs and battery management controllers and all these things, they're insourcing, right? And this is something that China has been doing since 2015. Now, as far as the trailing edge, they're getting so much capacity there. as far as the leading edge, right?
IE this five nanometer and so on, so forth, right? Where GPUs, they are still behind. And this is the US restrictions are trying to stop them in the ladder.
But, you know, all that's happened, you know, is yes, they've slowed down their five nanometer, three nanometer, et cetera, but they've accelerated their, hey, 45 nanometer, 90 nanometer power IC or analog IC or, you know, random chip in my keyboard, right? That kind of stuff.
So, so there is an angle of like the U S's actions have been so from these export, you know, from the angle of the expert controls have been so inflammatory at slowing down China's progress on the leading edge that they've turned around and have accelerated their progress elsewhere because they know that this is so important, right?
If the U S is going to lock them out here or if they lock us out here as well, uh, in the trailing edge. And so going back, can the U S build it here? Um, Yes, but it's going to take a ton of money. I truly think like to revolutionize and completely in-source semiconductors would take a decade and a trillion dollars.
TSMC has some like 90,000 employees, right? It's not actually that insane an amount. The Arizona fab has 3,000 from Taiwan. And these people, their wives were like, yeah, we're not going to have kids unless you sign up for the Arizona fab. We go to Arizona and we have our kids there. There's also a Japan fab where the same thing happened, right?
And so these wives drove these dudes to go to Japan or America to have the kids there. It's an element of culture. Yeah, sure. Taiwan works that hard, but also the US has done it in the past. They could do it now, right? We can just import, I say import, the best people in the world if we want to.
And even if you can't import those people, I still think you could do a lot to manufacture most of them in the US if the money's there, right? It's just way more expensive. It's not profitable for a long time.
And that's the context of like the CHIPS Act is only like $50 billion relative to some of the renewable initiatives that were passed in the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Act, which total in the hundreds of billions of dollars, right? And so like the amount of money that the US is spending on the semiconductor industry is nothing, right?
Whereas all these other countries have structural advantages in terms of like work ethic and amount of work and things like that, but also a number of STEM graduates, the percentile of their best going to that, right? But they also have differences in terms of like, hey, there's just tax benefits in the law and have been in the law for 20 years, right?
And then some countries have massive subsidies, right? China has something like $200 billion of semiconductor subsidies a year. We're talking about $50 billion in the So the girth or difference in the subsidy amounts is also huge, right? And so I think Trump has been talking about tariffing Taiwan recently.
That's sort of like one of these things that's like, oh, okay, well, maybe he doesn't want to subsidize the semiconductor industry. Obviously, tariffing Taiwan is going to cost a lot of things to go get much more expensive, but does it change the equation for TSMC building more fabs in the US? That's what he's sort of positing, right?
To the same extent, they've also limited US companies from entering China. It's been a long time coming. At some point, there was a convergence. But over at least the last decade, it's been branching further and further out. US companies can't enter China. Chinese companies can't enter the US. The US is saying, hey, China, you can't get access to our technologies in certain areas.
And China's rebuttaling with the same thing around like, you know, they've done some sort of specific materials in, you know, gallium and things like that, that they've tried to limit the U.S. on. There's a U.S. drone company that's not allowed to buy batteries and they have like military customers.
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