What Next: TBD | Tech, power, and the future - How War in Taiwan Could Short-Circuit U.S. Tech
Slate News
Slate Podcasts
4.5 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 8 January 2023
⏱️ 25 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Roughly 95 percent of advanced semiconductor chip manufacturing happens in Taiwan, leaving the U.S. vulnerable to supply chain shocks and national security threats. Is the Biden administration’s $280 billion bill, signed in August last year, enough to boost domestic chip manufacturing?
Guest: Don Clark, freelance reporter specializing on chips and enterprise tech.
Host: Emily Peck
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| 0:49.5 | When Congress passed the Multi-Billion Dollar Chips and Science Act last summer with rare bipartisan |
| 0:54.8 | support, the bill grabbed headlines. People say it's the biggest jump into industrial policy |
| 1:00.9 | since like the 1950s. That's Don Clark. He's been covering the tech industry and writing about |
| 1:08.6 | chips, the Silicon kind, not the potato kind, for decades. It won't at all solve all the problems |
| 1:16.3 | that are out there about US reliance on foreign chips, but it's a big step. |
| 1:20.8 | Tiny semiconductor chips are essentially the brains powering our modern lives. We use them all day |
| 1:27.6 | long in our coffee pots, our cars, and of course our cell phones. But these tiny chips also hold |
| 1:34.0 | the key to immense economic and government power. Businesses like Apple rely on them to keep their |
| 1:39.5 | edge in the market, and the US government needs them too. Those little silicone wafers help create |
| 1:45.3 | advanced weaponry and are crucial to national security. Even in a super partisan era, chips are viewed |
| 1:52.1 | as too important to become political fodder. Congress was on the defensive when the bill passed, |
| 1:57.6 | worried about the country's reliance on foreign chip manufacturers, particularly in Taiwan, |
| 2:02.7 | which makes nearly all of the most advanced chips out there. That used to be fine, |
| 2:08.0 | well sort of, but the pandemic gummed up the supply chain, and maybe more worrying, |
| 2:13.6 | there's the China issue. It was a rare thing because it was a bipartisan effort. Both |
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