Comment by javajosh

The US has an overabundance of brilliant physics PhDs most of which are probably pretty sick of academia's bullshit at this point. Let's give 2000 of them a 100k/year job plus $5B, cheap/free access to federal land, energy, and water, and see what kind of fab(s) they could make. I bet they'd get to TSMC's level pretty quick. If we offered Taiwan a mutual defense pact, we might even get their help to get there.