I wonder if there's a way to factor in planning time needed. My perception is that the US requires years of (e.g. environmental) reviews before construction can begin which countries like China do not have.
It'd also be really interesting to a similar view on cost per square foot. The US is probably expensive from high labour + land costs, but it might more even expensive than those would suggest.
TSMC has a great business today, but world governments are dumping around a few hundred billion dollars in subsidies towards local TSMC competitors (e.g. ~$25B-$75B from the CHIPS act alone depending on how you count)
TSMC's moat isn't enough to withstand that much subsidized competition. All of those new competitors will chase market share and destroy the profitability of the market.
Yeah, chip market is very likely to go from boom to bust. There was an incredible amount of investment as governments realized that chips needed to be commodity cheap with guaranteed supply or the modern economy could collapse. Expect silicon to be more like wheat and oil moving forward, heavily subject to government investment, regulation and controls to ensure a steady supply.
It doesn’t matter how much money governments are throwing at competitors. The expertise required is tied up in Taiwan everything else is just to get political brownie points.
Just like when the TSMC factory does come online and is fully operational in the US, there will still be a huge dependency on Taiwanese manufacturing.
It’s the same thing you saw when Cook prostrated himself to Trump showing Apple “bringing Mac manufacturing to the US”. All they did was bring final assembly of Mac Pros that sold in low volumes back.
Apple did the same in the UK and other countries to make the politicians look good.
Your memories of the 5th grade are likely much more recent than mine. As I recall it, showing your work was occasionally necessary for my own edification especially when my final answer was a result of hasty guesswork predicated on faulty assumptions.
Mr Munger making it to a ripe old age and being a wealthy man to boot could literally be shaving years off your life expectancy. But I sense that if you write out all your thinking, step by step, you might find a flaw in that line of reasoning. Even though it is.. simple mathematics. ;)
I would think of this like a normal customer development / lean startup problem.
Is there anyone other than your company using this API? If not, it might make sense to find a single "customer" and make sure the API solves tons of problems for them. If you cannot get first adopter, iterate on the product/API until you can create something that a customer loves.
It sounds like people don't see strong enough value in being the early adopters of these APIs. You might need to iterate on API/product until they do.
I wonder how they're thinking about this versus the steady march of solar + battery performance.
I would think that in the 5-10 years it'll take to get this safe enough for a commercial product, solar + battery would be scaling and they'd never be able to catch up on price due to the efficiency ceiling.
Maybe there's something possible in aviation for this. There might be electric drones/planes applications which would be way better if they didn't have to carry batteries.
Yeah that's the idea. But if you have somewhere remote enough that's there's no power there then solar and wind are competitors to building wires. There are thousands upon thousands of houses in the US that choose to put up solar and wind and use batteries vs spend $50k to have wires pulled. Same for wells and septic vs city water and sewer.
Probably thinking about west coast of the South Island, New Zealand. Its rugged weather down there, still no mobile reception for most of it, sparsely populated and right up against the Alps.
They struggle to get powerlines/phone lines through already so I'm not surprised they're thinking this might be a valid option to relay power for small settlements.
Solar + batteries competes with wires by being distributed. You install as much generation as you need, right where you need it. In this context you could think of it as a "wireless power receiver" and the sun as the transmitter.
Yep, and fair enough, NZ is a lot more bumpy. It's still not that difficult to install rooftop solar etc. in most situations, even if it's not applicable to every case, though.
