Tech giants join call for funding U.S. chip production

Translation: Some of America's richest companies want a welfare state for tech corporates so they don't have to pay the extra that local manufacturing would cost.

Sacks of climate change mitigation cash has been diverted by the pandemic. Now one of America's richest sectors wants more to featherbed their profits and bonuses.

If you want to make chips in America, use some of your enormous cash piles to build your own factories.

In a globalised system, concentrations of production reduce the environmental and economic hit. Politics should work around that, not break it for ideological reasons.

If I lived in Japan, I would say that now is the time to move on to fundamentally new chipsets with ternary logic. As long as the US spends money on conventional chips with binary logic, Japan could get ahead in this race. Computing systems with ternary logic, they are, in principle, different: since they are based not on binary mathematics, but on ternary.

Subsidies only reward laziness and inefficiency. When the cost of a subsidy is compared to any resulting economic benefit, the costs always in every case exceed the value of any benefits so derived. All these supposedly smart business people now see the problems inherent in their current supply chain. Let them change it on their own dime. I could see the US DoD subsidizing specific chips for military applications only, a decision that would not be based on economic considerations but on maintaining self sufficiency and securing specific technologies, but nothing more.

f I lived in Japan, I would say that now is the time to move on to fundamentally new chipsets with ternary logic. As long as the US spends money on conventional chips with binary logic, Japan could get ahead in this race. Computing systems with ternary logic, they are, in principle, different: since they are based not on binary mathematics, but on ternary.

I understand the difference between binary and ternary logic but to make such chips profitable to make the world is going to have to abandon binary logic for a lot of product lines and replace it with ternary logic. Absent a clear reason to do so I don't see major industries doing so. A market niche might develop but I don't see it ever matching the demand for binary chips and thus prices will be high.