In the Russia thread, you said something to the effect that my post on having principalled but pragmatic foreign policy, was a nice idea but never going to happen. Same thing is true about having a forward looking rather than reactive industrial policy.
I think that’s partly true, but only partly. Japan has had the equivalent of CHIPs act since the 1970, South Korea and China late 80s, and 90s, and France and German off and on, and more recently the EU had bill or two… From what I can deal Taiwan’s subsidies were fairly modest a couple billion, an innovation center and close collaboration with universities.
Intel was able to push Moore law through the 80s and 90s, by reinvesting it is large profit from microprocessors, into the fabs and process technologies. Andy Grove’s, motto " only the paranoid survive" ensure sure that we never stopped running. AMD, Motorola and most of the rest of US companies couldn’t keep up, and eventually went either fabless like AMD or just got out of the business
When I left Intel, in 2000, TSMC was barely on the radar screen a $2 billion company that was modestly profitable. Intel was 34 billion and very profitable. There is a lot of debate as to exactly how Intel lost the lead, with the last 2 CEO being pretty much universally panned. But TMSC management deserves a lot of credit, it didn’t just beat Intel, but a lot of giant Japanese and South Korean firms.
They seemed to take care of its people and spent a ton on R&D.
Like most big companies, Intel spend tens of billions on stock buyback this century. (To no avail the stock price today $36 is lower than why I sold most of my stock in early 2000 at $60). It is worth noting, that when Pat Gelsinger announced that buybacks were ending. Instead, the money would be spent on Fabs and process technology instead. Wall St. rewarded the news with a prompt downgrading of the stock. So much for taking the long view.