When New Mexico and Germany had fabs, South Korea was still a developing country ruled by a brutal dictatorship.

What happened was simple - both Taiwan and South Korea and now China took concerted steps in investing into their semiconductors businesses. South Korea did this indirectly through favourable arrangements for the industry players via the chaebol system, while China and Taiwan did this with more direct government investment into the industry.

Sure, you can't just dump money into the industry and become a semiconductor player, else the Middle Eastern countries would have tried that ages ago. Yes, the talent being locally present is important but you're once again bringing up tired tropes about Asian working culture as being relevant.

You brought up the New Mexico story quite well, but that place is notorious for the exploitation of Navajo women's labor. In the first place, the factory was occupied and shut down by the American Indian Movement. You know full well that this is a story about the exploitation of Native Americans, so why are you bringing it up like that?

The history of Shiprock itself is, at its core, a history of "cheap, obedient labor." You frame it only as state-led investment, but the reality is that the culture behind it is complex.

What my post is pointing out is not that "Asian culture is superior." What I'm pointing out is the harsh working conditions in Asia — where working hours are extremely long, and even highly educated workers are inevitably subjected to grueling hours. Why do you think TSMC's Arizona fab in the U.S. keeps getting delayed? The U.S. invested money through the CHIPS Act, but American engineers refuse to accept the "military-style 24/7 on-call readiness and brutal shift work" that exists in Taiwan. TSMC founder Morris Chang himself has pointed this out before.

What I'm saying is that the educational infrastructure is so well-established that it's easy to produce a large supply of highly educated workers, and that these highly educated workers then have to be submissive to inhumane working conditions. This isn't about Asian superiority — it's actually pointing out something bad about Asia. But from the context of your comment, it seems like you misunderstood me as saying "Asian work culture is superior" and replied based on that assumption. That was never my intention.

Before you leave a comment, I'd ask you to show some basic respect to others.

There are plenty of places with highly educated cheap workforces who work hard. Eastern European culture is almost identical down to the whole "tiger mom" stereotype.

And there are numerous counter examples: Ireland has a huge semiconductor industry: https://www.siliconrepublic.com/careers/semiconductor-compan...

The US is full of the "military-style 24/7 on-call readiness and brutal shift work" - at the high end silicon valley is built on this, and at the low end every single non-unionized factory is this.

TSMC has never built a fab outside Taiwan. Of course there will be problems.

As you said, if it were just about labor, other countries would probably have some supply of it as well. But in the case of Eastern Europe, there was likely American pushback against the European continent. As you know, semiconductors today can't be made entirely by a single entity. They're connected through a chain of trust. If Europe were to move beyond just producing semiconductor equipment and start directly manufacturing semiconductors through fabs, it would easily become a competitor to the U.S. rather than a supply chain partner.

In fact, the semiconductor chain is deliberately fragmented so that no single player can monopolize it.

On top of that, the U.S. is using South Korea and Taiwan to contain China. Under the ideology of protecting foundries from Chinese aggression and industrial attacks, the U.S. is sending the signal that it can cut off the supply chain. Eastern Europe, on the other hand, is tied up with the EU, making it much harder for the U.S. to control.

In the end, what matters when the consumer nation, the U.S., outsources production is how securely it can relocate it. Look at what happened to Japan's semiconductor industry. It was crushed through the 1986 agreement. The U.S. simply does not tolerate the emergence of an independent manufacturing hub that possesses sovereign economic power.

What matters is whether the U.S. can maintain control while keeping the price low.

There's a story in one of Feynman's memoir where he figures out that pausing the live system and debugging its physical RAM stack is turning out to be more time consuming than simply scheduling a new corrected task, on some particular 1940s mechanical supercomputer he was assigned to as a tech. It might not have taken Feynman to notice that, but you can assign Feynman for that, and it worked for the Manhattan project.

The parent comment isn't (just) reiterating the tired tropes, but pointing out that East Asia has an "educational base" similar to industrial base that supports its high tech. I don't think that much is so strange way of thinking. The state of ME countries(maybe except Iran) soft proves it - they don't believe in such a thing. And they don't have a semiconductor industry. Pure coincidence? I doubt it.

(And on "This isn't about Asian superiority — it's actually pointing out something bad about Asia." from jdw64, yuuup 100% it is quad plus bad - IMO a thing about East Asia is that there's zero inter-national mobility due to the notoriously high language barrier, so competitions are closed to within borders, and the bar just drift skywards indefinitely because of that. There was a massive domestic hiring freeze in Japan during the 90s that made "janitors with a PhD" actually not so rare, but none of them hit the global labor market or started companies - the Japanese bar for janitors just went up to PhDs. It is said that success of Japanese 7-11 was partially attributable to that event, that, when you happen to have all the cashiers manned 24/7 with top scientists, you can just throw million different tasks and they can handle it perfectly, put aside whether they're happily doing it)

Los Alamos would still be a desert without USG giving it a few billion dollars every year.

A lot of the processes are automated, but at the points where automation hasn't reached, there are quite a few things that are genuinely complex to handle.

Mainland China also has the 996 schedule for office workers purely as a cargo cult ritual, forcing people to sit at a desk at midnight and pantomime doing work.

As for the 996 culture, I agree to some extent. My Chinese friends hated it too. But in China, there's this thing called neijuan (involution / the rolled up scroll). there are just so many job seekers that people are forced to endure it. What neijuan means here is "Eating one's own flesh" basically knowing that this competition is damaging to everyone involved but doing it anyway.