US Workers while costing more do seem are still competitive at expensive high value tasks. There was some reports a year back where the TSMC labs in Arizona while employee costs were higher also had 4% higher yield [1].
I'd wager combining that with US defense contracts for US made chips would be lucrative for NVidia.
is it high value? I know a guy working at a fab in Taiwan and he makes peanuts ($2-3K a month?). It's basically a factory job. From what he said it sounded braindead. TSMC is known for overpaying and having PhDs stare at assembly lines though - so I dunno.
It's high value but low margins work. It played a major role into why Intel began offshoring a large portion of it's fab work abroad back in the 1990s-2000s, and also why TSMC became a player in the space undercutting Japanese, Korean, Singapore, and Malaysian/American (Intel) vendors.
In Taiwan they are by far the highest paying employer (maybe Google/Microsoft branches here are comparable). The base pay is usually not impressive, but they come with insane bonus packages. They basically hoover up all the top graduates that haven't left abroad.
They're kind of notorious for have overqualified workers. PhDs left monitoring assembly lines or writing accounting software
My bad - didn't see the qualifier for Taiwan there.
Yea, TSMC pay is decent by Taiwan standards, but imo that's largely because Taiwan salaries are fairly low even compared to other East Asian nations when factoring CoL.
Googling TSMC margin and it looks to be 53%-59% gross margin. That is after they became the leading global fab of course.
No doubt keeping costs low helped them get to that stage. Still that's a crazy margin. I imagine much of it's re-invested.
IMHO, Intel could've kept up but dropped the ball pretty hard. The volume of ARM / cell phone cpus caught them off guard and huge amounts of revunue let TSMC drive forward.
sorry, I should have thought about it a bit more. It's likely closer to 2K than 3K. A professor at Taiwan University makes ~3K. My only other point of reference is another friend's husband who works as an electric engineer at a LED manufacturer - making 2K a month. Minimum wage is $1K. Point being.. they're miserable jobs and the salaries are low low low. I get fabs sound fancy, but I'm not super sure anyone should be stoked these kinds of jobs are "coming back" to the US.
While I am more of the belief that these people are wanting a time with less income equality and conflating that with factory work.
There's going to be a bunch of people wanting any job [1] and more in the coming years. So they'd probably cheer a local walmart as much as a local tsmc.
I've had a number of friends who worked at Micron in Boise at their semi-fabs. Yes boring work, but the pay was decent. Especially for guys just graduating. I think it was like a 4-10 schedule.
I'd wager combining that with US defense contracts for US made chips would be lucrative for NVidia.
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41952534