Rene Haas

company, but I would do the same if I would, working together, pooling capital for some of these initiatives to essentially get some type of grounding.

You need universities, but you need corporations to get behind this as well, as well as financing, private equity, all kinds of different capital, because this is a...

This is a huge capital investment that also requires investment from companies and private equity, but at the same time needs to last for years.

I don't want to take anything away from David.

He's doing an amazing job, as the AIs are.

You've hit a very key tenet, though, relative to world-class manufacturing inside the United States and what is required to make that happen.

We had it decades ago.

Believe it or not, there was a time where the leading contract manufacturers

in the world were US-based companies.

And we knew how to do that.

And if you go back 30 years ago, when Apple and Compaq used to build their own PCs and they had their own factories, believe it or not, then all of that went to companies like Flextronics and SCI, et cetera, et cetera.

So we had that.

Ultimately, for cost reasons, that began to move all the way to the Far East and to Foxconn in China, et cetera, et cetera.

There's a great book, Apple in China, that documents a lot of this.

To your point in terms of could we get that back, in some ways, there's no reason why we couldn't.

But it is a mindset.

TSMC is a 24-7 operation where if a line goes down or a customer's got a problem, not only are the technicians need to be ready to go, the engineers need to be ready to go.

And that is something that I think we've lost the muscle memory inside the United States, quite frankly, on how to go do that.

I mean, we may have had it

a generation or so ago i don't know that we have it now and we certainly haven't trained a generation of folks to look at manufacturing jobs as being something that is as lucrative and prestigious they're sort of thinking oh it's a blue collar job i don't want to go into that way it's not viewed that way uh in taiwan right and in taiwan if you say you're working for tsmc you're studying to go off and do that it's a highly prestigious kind of thing so it's it's not just