As it looks now we are heading to a semi slump with declining demand and oversupply while bailing out a disfunctional giant. My guess we are going to see fabs that are so challenged on revenue that they are unable to cover the operational costs. Let alone provide a return on the amount invested.
There are very few companies that actually own fabs for mass production in the United States. AMD use to own fabs but they sold them quite some time ago.
By virtue of being one of the five companies (while also being the largest) you’re going to easily get the money.
As for why, fabs are a tremendous resource for a specialized economy and will easily become a national security risk due to how wide spread they are in the military and to sell advanced products.
There’s also a de globalization movement that’s been underway for nearly a decade. Having a country whose neighbors aren’t in a politically stable region of the world is a future disaster. It’s also proven to be a disastrous domestic policy where supply constraints crunches every company.
It’s likely going to take a decade to resolve the supply chain issues and it nearly takes half a decade to bring a new fab online.
China's entire industrial base is state subsidized. TSMC is a strategic asset of Taiwan. The US is still strongly dominant in aerospace, and there are few efforts or companies in that entire sector that are not subsidized (largely by defense spending and NASA). I could fill up several pages with this.
If nobody subsidized their industries, then maybe we could do just fine without subsidizing ours. In today's world, not subsidizing key industries is unilateral disarmament. It'd be like the USA unilaterally giving up all its nuclear weapons while Russia, China, North Korea, etc. still have theirs and hoping everyone plays nice.
Ask Russia how not having domestic chip fab capability is working out for them.
The efficient market rewards inefficient stock buybacks, record debt fueled dividends, years of underinvestment, low wages, and most of all no strings attached bailouts. They may be a loser, but we'll pay for their loss. Socialize the losses/costs and privatize the gains.
Settling for 1/10th those amounts years later (after the lawsuits look like they are going badly) would compensation for anticompetitive behavior. Settling early for the full price (or more) is a bailout.
Lawsuits aren’t limited to the exact damages, Intel settled early to reduce the risk of a massive loss in the future.
It’s important to realize the lawsuit could easily have survived past the point where AMD failed as a company. Just as patents get sold off so too can potential damages from lawsuits.
They explicitly told people that they settled early (and generously) to avoid antitrust risk. Intel could have bankrupted AMD with the process. They chose to pay them a lot of money instead. Why? A bailout.
They said that due to good marketing rather than admit wrongdoing, but being a monopoly isn’t illegal. In fact they likely qualified as a monopoly at the time.
I think that given AMD's balance sheet at the time, and the state of the lawsuits, they would have allowed them to run their course for a lot longer. Giving your competitors generous settlements at the beginning phases of a lawsuit is not usually good practice.
Because is TSMC was unavailable to the USA it would take many years for the USA to recover. This bail out gives the USA a head start on a TSMC replacement so that we don't have to halt production of GPUs, CPUs, phones, tablets, appliances, cars, trucks, cranes, tanks, missiles, etc. etc. etc.
