The Messy Reality of ‘Made in America’
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This is Andrew Ross Sorkin, the founder of Dealbook. Every year, I interview some of the world's most influential leaders across politics, culture, and business at the Dealbook Summit, a live event in New York City. On this year's podcast, you'll hear my unfiltered conversations with Gavin Newsom, the CEO of Palantir and Anthropic, and Erica Kirk, the widow of Charlie Kirk. Listen to Dealbook Summit wherever you get your podcasts.
From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. The construction of a massive factory in Arizona was supposed to embody the Trump administration's ability to bring manufacturing back to the U.S., Instead, as my colleague Peter Goodman found out, it's provided companies around the world with literally 18,000 reasons to think twice about building in America. It's Monday, December 22nd.
Peter, good of you to come into the studio. Delighted. I wonder, just to start this conversation, if you can describe this factory that you recently visited to us. Yeah, sure.
So it's about 9.20 in the morning on Friday, and I'm just arriving.
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.
I'm standing on a gravel road, looking at cactuses and various desert scrub just flowing out to the horizons, that this is all going to get filled up with housing and offices.
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.
The complex itself, I'm looking at a long, low gray building with a bunch of smokestacks visible on top. You can see at least a dozen cranes. You can hear the roar of something. There's black smoke now coming out of the top of one of these buildings. And beyond, you can see these cranes that are working.
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.
And then to the west of there, there's a tunnel.
There's still more. And then there's more visible like way beyond to the west.
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.
Just beyond, I see heavy equipment on the move. I see diggers that are moving soil around. potties as you would expect at a giant construction project. I mean, this is, people say, the biggest construction project in North America. And I got to say, it doesn't disappoint.
And looking at this factory under construction evokes that sense as well.
What is the significance of the factory being built in Arizona?
Of scale. Not just scale, but that this is important beyond the thing itself.
What does it represent, this gargantuan, crane-filled factory-ville?
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. Computer chips are the brains of just about everything. The iPhone in your hand, the data centers that are getting built all over the place to make artificial intelligence work.
They're going into our cars. They're going into our appliances. I mean, it's pretty hard to think about any manufactured product now that doesn't have some kind of computer chip.
So it would seem like a very, very big and... overdue thing to have such a factory building those chips right here in America.
It's a big deal. I mean, it is the most palpable manifestation of this really, I think you can say national aspiration to build things in America again.
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