The problemare the walled gardens. I believe if people could own their hardware, as in install the OS and bootloader they want, all of this wouldn't matter. Just make this and common interfaces for hardware mandatory and let companies create their own ecosystems compete with the preinstalled ones.
The worst limitations, which are missing documentation for good repairability or alternative drivers programming, general hardware unrepairability and firmware/OS replacement aren't addressed. We saw these issues in that FCC post about IoT. Being the owner of my own device and being able to extend it's lifetime is the baseline for freeing people from tyrannical software and hardware practices.
What about the CHIPS act and its $52 billion in subsidies and tax benefits? Is Intel just another arm of US government now? And EU will do the same. I believe it's understandable that every political block wants to be independent in such important technologies.
There is a pretty strong argument that there are a set of companies that the USG considers "too big/important to fail" given the roles they have played in defense and associated industries. Boeing and Lockheed certainly, Microsoft and Intel and Dell most probably.
Without Intel, the CIA and NSA can't do CIA and NSA stuff. I think they're safe.
I can't see them changing their domain controllers and sharepoint out for macs and mediawiki any time soon, any more than I can see them flying A330s.
It should be safe to assume they are pumping money to other companies, such as SMIC and, more recently, Moore Threads. Although they are years behind and, for example, MTT S80 is at 750Ti levels in lots of aspects, it's quite astonishing the advancements they made in such short amount of time.
TSMC spends $36B annually on capital by itself. It’s hard to fathom how massive they have become, few government budgets can keep up with such tech costs.
