The race for semiconductor supremacy | FT Film

the slumbering giant that is America has finally awakened chips is now at the very heart of U. S China tensions technological leadership has been the source of U. S strength since World War II we shouldn't be dependent on any one port any one country any one Island an economic competition that is manageable could turn into something bigger and hotter and unmanageable [Music] um American manufacturing the backbone of our economy began to get hollowed out companies move jobs overseas today we're down to producing only around 10 percent of the world's chips despite leading the world in research and design of new chip Technologies but folks where is it written where is it written that America can't lead the world once again in manufacturing it's hard to think of a component in any product really that's more ubiquitous and more essential than the semiconductor today almost any device with an on off switch has one or often dozens or hundreds of semiconductors inside they power our cars airplanes trains Communications rely on them factories ordinary businesses and finance and Banks money moves thanks to these chips U.

S no longer manufactures the most Innovative chips seven nanometers or below Taiwan manufactures 92 percent of those chips eight percent of those chips were manufactured in South Korea and none are manufactured in in the U. S we just want more of the new manufacturing that's coming online to happen in the U. S there was a sense that globalization is inevitable we should offshore these jobs no big deal if the Rust Belt is hollowed out that decision is is one of the reasons that the U.

S elected Donald Trump and that is why Joe Biden is pushing industrial strategy and that is why we are at a pendulum shift in the political economy not just in the U. S but in many developed countries when people think about industrial policy it has been a bit of a dirty word in the U. S politic and hey free market should Reign this is not like any other industry this is so critical for the future and I think that's why you know it really deserves somewhat unique attention from an industrial policy perspective the Congress privilege and it's to present to you the president of the United States we're going to make sure the supply chain for America begins in America that's why that's why we came together to pass the bipartisan chips and science Act this is really the crowning Jewel in in the Biden policy Crown so what's behind the chips Act is an attempt to protect the economic security of the US far into the future the whole chips Act is 52.

7 billion dollars 39 billion is for Grants there's also an investment tax credit on top of this which gives a 25 tax credit off of any Fab that's constructed or or improved upon the focus of the chips Act is on producing the chips that the U. S needs for its National Security requirements Department of Defense the intelligence agencies and the associated companies are going to build products for them as the U. S looks to become a a real leader in global chip making again it's looking at creating centers across the country where it can build up on on the skills both of the people and and of the local suppliers that can that are needed around these large chip Fabs these are fabrication plots these are the big factories and they produce the Wafers like large discs of silicon on which chips are printed and then cut so this is really at the heart of all chip making and these plants cost tens of billions of dollars you have some of the largest industrial projects that have ever been undertaken and they're building the smallest things that have ever been built on Earth and if we get there we have good transistors and a good cost structure we're going to win Foundry customers and Manufacturing will shift back to the US today the Rust Belt ends today the Silicon Heartland begins [Music] is one of five U.

S Workforce hubs focused on manufacturing jobs [Music] it is really an exciting day to be here and this Builds on 40 years that Intel has been in Arizona we put our chips on the table right with this investment now we're going to put our shovels in the ground and get this thing underway and we are excited for the opportunity to expand and now have over 50 billion dollars of invested capital in the state of Arizona Arizona has been a center of semiconductor Manufacturing in the U. S for several decades but in the past couple of years it's seen major new Investments both from Intel and from tsmc both of which are building brand new Cutting Edge chip making facilities Advanced manufacturing has been an incredible industry for Arizona and part of the reason I'm so focused in on it as mayor is I feel that it'll develop a healthier economy more diverse and that so much of the future of the world's technologies will need chips which are going to be made here in Phoenix the chips Act is going to change Phoenix forever we have seen unemployment rates change and we're also working on the workforce side and we were recently selected by the White House as one of five Workforce hubs I'm very focused on trying to create a knowledge-based economy with high-wage jobs that's why I'm betting on the semiconductor industry Arizona State University has been a key partner in our semiconductor expansion the rate at which the technology is moving that is the smallness of the features right you hear about three nanometers you hear about two nanometer this is coming okay and those are really pushing the boundaries of what physics will allow well how do we solve that problem that gets an engineering student excited engineering and these students they want to solve problems foreign [Applause] I was really interested into working in semiconductor industry I chose Material Science because Material Science is something that people in the industry are looking for I'm interested to be an inventor and making technology in a specific area inventing new materials to like improve the chips trying to make an impact on our society now I feel like I'm getting very close to that dream so this is our clean room and we have a lot of tools but you could notice one of the things you would start noticing right away this area is wide that area is yellow and again coming back to like when you do the any sort of lithography work when you're exposing like a film and you're developing it you want to have like no UV light the U. S doesn't have all the talent to staff these Fabs you're going to need about 27 000 people with fairly High technical skills over the next five to ten years because we're going to need thousands of people from outside the U.

S with the right skills which means we're going to have to facilitate the immigration of these people U. S like has like such a environment where you can succeed if you want to if you really strive for something you can achieve it and that's what attracts me in U. S I didn't feel the same way back in my country Talent is a big challenge we need to overcome there's then there's two sides of it one we need to work harder on stem education that's one side of the coin and that's going to fix the medium and and long term the short term we need to have some modifications to our immigration policy which is very very broken for high skilled immigration if you look at the founding of Silicon Valley there were uh workers from Europe from Korea from Egypt for example in the founding of some of the earliest companies in Silicon Valley it's an area of concern it's an area of priority and the chips act and funding some of that skills development but at the same time I look at this and the response that we've gotten for instance from University system in the U.

S you know at the community college level at the University level you know the top tier schools has been phenomenal [Music] Intel is one of the most underrated stories in the tech industry and that's a big thing to say given how prominent it's been and everybody knows the brand but what I don't think people appreciate is that for about half a century this company was the complete leader in an entire industry it invented integrated circuits which are the what we think of as microprocessors as chips and it basically LED that industry in manufacturing for a half a century and what that meant was that with each new generation of chips it designed it also developed the manufacturing processes to build them and it was developing things that were smaller and faster than anybody else could design and it was it was typically two to three years or even more ahead of the entire Global chip industry but what's happened more recently is a different story in the last five to eight years Intel lost its Edge it lost its ability T to just keep staying one step ahead of the rivals if you like and other companies caught up the plan that I've laid out for Intel says that we'll invest about 30 billion in capital per year for five years 150 billion dollars these are extraordinary Investments and when you go look at those of you know tsmc or Samsung you know they're similar we've been declining for 30 years can we start inclining for the next 30 Years foreign [Music] here is a world where material is grown into crystals with controlled impurities with intolerances which are molecular even atomic the objective semiconductors transistors and diodes needed by the millions so at the very beginning of the chip age Gordon Moore who was one of the founders of intel was looking for a way to explain to people how chips were going to be in everything how Electronics the whole world of electronics was about to go through a revolution that nobody could quite understand in 1965 Gordon Moore set out in a paper what became known as Moore's Law the idea behind it was that the number of transistors per chip would double every year or two and that was just a prediction it's not a law of nature but it's proven correct for over half a century the basic goal whatever the product make it smaller more reliable more economical extend its function if you go to the store and buy a new smartphone just the primary semiconductor on the phone will have 10 or 20 billion tiny transistors carved into the silicon and each one of those transistors is so small it's roughly the size of a coronavirus and there's no device that we've produced at such vast scale using such microscopic components now as transistors get smaller and smaller it's getting harder than ever before to shrink them further major companies like Intel or tsmc they've outlined very clear Pathways to keep Moore's Law alive for years to come till the periodic table is exhausted Moore's Law isn't finished right we're just gonna you know keep bending the edge of science to find you know how to keep these advancements underway for the future of AI for the future of all sorts of technological advances it's absolutely critical that we keep this rate of innovation happening as rapidly as possible for many years into the future trips have been at the center of electronics and Computing from the very beginning and it's been very easy to ignore them they're just there we take them for granted but all that's changed we've all discovered during the pandemic that an interruption of Chip supplies can affect everything can affect all manufacturing Industries so suddenly the chip world is being turned on its head and Intel in the all-purpose chip world is really trying to rethink it's wrong six million Vehicles were taken out of production plans in 2021 due to the semiconductor shortage over the course of 2021 and 2022 car companies globally saw several hundred billion dollars in Lost sales because they couldn't get the chips they needed to finish their cars car lines shut down just because there weren't enough chips available car makers cut their purchases of chips thinking they would sell fewer cars and so all the chip makers instead sold to PC companies and then suddenly there was a whiplash how do we de-risk how do we make sure that we have multiple suppliers so that we aren't reliant on a single supplier and how do we make sure there's enough capacity in the supply chain today 90 of the world's most advanced processors the types of chips in your smartphone or PC or in data centers and telecoms infrastructures can only be produced by tsmc which has all of its most advanced production in Taiwan in 1990 we manufactured 37 of semiconductors here on U. S Shores now we manufacture 12 percent and falling over concentration in manufacturing in East Asia is neither good for our national security or Economic Security tsmc the global leader at the moment basically focuses on most of its manufacturing close to its home and operates absolutely massive plants with huge output when the company was founded in 1987 it had a really unique business model it would only manufacture ships not design any in-house and that business model let it serve a wide variety of customers companies like apple or Nvidia and as a result it's grown far larger than any other chip maker of its kind and because of its scale it's been able to drive down costs but also hone its technology because for every silicon wafer it produces it gathers data hones its production processes and so it's not a coincidence that tsmc is both the world's largest ship maker it's also the world's Advanced chip maker should we have 92 percent of all semiconductors in Taiwan maybe not such a good idea that's an incredible vulnerability and it really makes you stop and think how did we get to a place where countries and companies thought that this was okay you know I think a lot about what would happen in this country around the world if there were to be a blockade of Taiwan if there were to be a hot war in the South China Seas the only near-term comparison we have to something like this is the war in Ukraine that created a global market event we had inflation you know we had huge Corrections we had you know both in companies and countries an interruption of the supply chains not just in ships but in everything through the South China Seas would be a thousand times that this is a bad day for president XI and the Chinese Communist Party the slumbering giant that is America has finally awakened to the challenge that we Face from the People's Republic of China their aggressive posture in the region and the potential they would have of cutting off our access to Advanced semiconductors predictable Chinese drills around Taiwan this morning simulating sealing off this self-governed island Taiwan says dozens of Chinese warplanes once again crossed the very sensitive de facto Maritime border of the Taiwan Strait over the past decade Chinese military power in the Taiwan Straits has grown dramatically as China's ramped up its military spending and focused almost all of its military efforts on threatening Taiwan foreign [Music] imagine what would happen today if instead of an oil embargo like we had in the 1970s there was a chip embargo if the economy collapses and if there are large interruptions in in everyday life and the functioning of society you could essentially expect production lines across the world to just start the global Paradigm is changing and that creates bumps and that can create conflict and there is a real risk at this moment that an economic competition that is manageable could turn into something bigger and hotter and unmanageable and that really does worry me what if China in some way got control of Taiwan it doesn't have to be an invasion but a much lower budget approach would be to make sure that the right folks won the next Taiwanese election and what happens if the Taiwanese government says to the U. S thanks a lot you can go now conflict need not be military conflict and that's a point it gets lost we have a chance to manage that conflict using things like export controls using things like industrial policy but conflict is inevitable and that's where the semiconductor industry and the chips act come in in the tension that's emerged between the U.

S and China the Computing industry in the tech industry is at the heart of future Global competitiveness and National Security and in that Tech rivalry that's emerged chips are right at the center the U. S has realized that it's China's lack of a real skill in making Advanced chips that is the only thing that's holding it back from becoming an advanced technology power and so the US is actively acting to stop China gaining that chip technology it's not in our interest to provide technology to China that could be used against us and at a time when it's engaged in a buildup of its nuclear weapons program in a very opaque way today China is a relatively minor player in the chip industry China spends as much money each year importing semiconductors and suspends importing oil and China has to buy all these semiconductors from abroad because it's domestic capabilities at The Cutting Edge are quite Limited in addition to the 25 to 30 percent it consumes you know it has another 25 to 30 percent of world supply chain goes through China so it plays a critical role in the supply chain as well in 2014 Chinese president Xi Jinping identified semiconductors as a core technology that China should produce domestically and since that point china has poured tens of billions of dollars a year roughly one ships act a year into subsidizing its own domestic production foreign industry has become like a symbol of whether China can build its own self-reliance technology industry at the center of the government-led investment it's the national integrated circuits fund known as the big fund so big funds have been raising 340 billion Renminbi which is 47 billion dollar since 2014 and so far with lots of fruits from such a big investment so Beijing have to basically rethink whether this is such an approach it's useful in aggregate Chinese chip industry still lags behind technologically despite all these generous subsidies and when you look across the supply chain China is years behind The Cutting Edge in Taiwan Korea or other countries the big shift that we're seeing is more of a bifurcation between the China Focus chip industry and the chip industry selling to the rest of the world it's not just the basic science that has to be groked but there's a lot of tests nowatives if you wish shop floor knowledge into how to make it work that's very hard to replicate tsmc has a tremendous amount of shop floor knowledge that tacit knowledge of their workers of how to make those processes actually run and produce high yields the U. S is considering tightening curbs on the export of chips to China Advanced semiconductors a key development and National Security priority in China um foreign foreign and we see competition not conflict investing in our alliances and working with our allies to protect Advanced Technologies so they will not be used against us [Music] the chip world is now moving into specialized chips for specialized purposes in AI that means gpus a different type of Chip that was originally designed for gaming but has now been repurposed for AI and we've seen Nvidia which is really leads the world in gpus become the world's most valuable chip company and indeed hit a trillion dollar valuation just on the strength of these single purpose chips that work well in AI it used to be that emerging Technologies especially in the United States came out of the Department of Defense think of it Satellite Systems in general semiconductors themselves but also things like radar sonar GPS that now we can't live without but because they came out of the National Security Enterprise of the government you had a chance for them to diffuse slowly into civilian life and the US government could manage whatever risk they had of their adversaries using the same technology today there are a bunch of Technologies Artificial Intelligence being just one of them where the lead of this is actually happening in the private sector and the US government is trying to catch up and as the government appreciates what the National Security implications of these Technologies are how does it now try to put rabbits back in the box or manage the risks that these technologies have to the National Security competing with China requires everyone on the field operating as a whole of government and working in a bipartisan way with Congress it requires the use of the full extent of our economic diplomatic and Military Tools in 2022 the U.

S imposed new restrictions on the transfer of certain ships used to train artificial intelligence systems to China today almost all of the world's Advanced AI chips are designed by U. S firms and manufactured in Taiwan and data centers in China that were training AI systems were using these ships as well and the US wants to limit China's access to these high-end ships with the aim of constraining China's ability to deploy AI systems for defense and intelligence use cases technological leadership has been the source of U. S strength since World War II and that was when the US discovered that if you have the most advanced technology you could make your own security you could achieve leadership in the world and a lot of what's happened since then has been an effort to keep America's technological Supremacy the U.