News Producing wafers at TSMC Arizona is only 10% more expensive than in Taiwan: TechInsights

[TerryLaze]

One of the main reasons that Intel is doomed is because VLSI costs are going up faster than ANY OF THEIR BUSINESSES ARE GROWING. Under these circumstances, you can hire the most brilliant engineers in the world and it won't matter. You must become a foundry and start taking outside customers.
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TSMC needs MONSTER PROFITS to build a next generation fab. They need to save up $30B for their next-generation 2N fab, with annual operating costs of $3B.

That doesn't make any sense at all.
If you just need X amount of money for the next generation FAB then you can stick to the current generation until you made enough money for the next.
Intel already did a test run of that with 10nm and they made a lot of money for many years with the same nm.

If you are a cutting edge FAB then you are screwed because you can't just hold for a few years until you made enough money, so we will have to wait and see, if the rumors are true and nvidia will use intel fabs then intel might keep going on making new FABs otherwise they might put that on ice and release 18A++++++.