Peter S. Goodman

I mean, there's this giant, mostly empty desert valley in the extreme north of Phoenix, as far as the eye could see, really.

Emptiness.

So this factory, I've seen a lot of factories in my day.

You sure have.

Is on a scale that I've never even imagined.

We're talking about more than a thousand acres.

And there are construction cranes in every direction.

Now, I lived in Shanghai, China, in the height of the construction boom there.

So I was in Dubai when Dubai was under enormous construction.

These are the only places where I've seen these numbers of cranes and numbers of construction people wandering about.

And that feeling of like you're present there for a moment when things are really changing in a deep way in that place.

And looking at this factory under construction evokes that sense as well.

Of scale.

Not just scale, but that this is important beyond the thing itself.

It represents a moment when a consensus broke out in the American political system, in the business world, that globalization...

This system that we've been living under for most of our adult lives has been very fruitful and beneficial in all sorts of ways, but there are some things where it matters where we make them.

And one of those things is computer chips.

We need to have our own stock of computer chips.

We need to make them at home in the event of war or disaster.

And that's what they're making in these factories that I saw.