Comment by UncleOxidant

Given the strategic importance of semiconductors and how expensive new fabs are and how long they take to start production (if you start planning a new state of the art fab now it'll take ~5 years before it's ready to produce chips) it seems like perhaps we need to look a public-private partnerships here in the US. The Chinese government is funding fabs. While we tend to be squeamish about such things here in the US, it's likely we need to start looking at doing this. At the very least the US Gov could step in to capitalize two or three companies to start foundries similar to TSMC. When they get on their feet they would become fully private entities that would pay back any government loans as they become profitable. I'm not sure we have the time to wait to see if Intel will decide to go big into the foundry biz - they seem to vacillate on this pretty regularly.