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CHIPS grants were calibrated to make U.S. investment preferable to overseas investment, using only the subsidy required.
Industrial construction rarely hits one absurd rule. Many defensible constraints accumulate into an impossible execution problem.
Domestic chip manufacturing would not substantially improve resilience if chips still had to be shipped to Taiwan for packaging.
For chip manufacturing, public support addressed shareholder pressure to invest where returns were highest, not a financing shortage.
The United States accepted relying on the Netherlands for EUV machines while investing elsewhere.
Chip supply-chain resilience requires every necessary stage, since domestic production cannot erase vulnerable upstream equipment or downstream processing.
Capital intensity and long construction times strengthen industrial-policy intervention. Crisis capacity cannot be built quickly.
The grant program secured semiconductor investments through case-by-case negotiation over the minimum necessary subsidy.
Supply-side incentives are powerful, but they cannot solve policy problems that require creating or steering demand.
Intel brings a major R&D ecosystem in Oregon, while Samsung committed to conduct R&D in the United States for the first time outside Korea.
Government intervention costs more than fiscal spending. Equity brings policy drawbacks, while grants and tax credits cost taxpayers.
Dependence on strategically important foreign suppliers can threaten political autonomy by limiting a country’s ability to sustain desired policy trajectories.
Industrial policy needs a broad toolkit matched to each company, industry, and problem.
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