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The US Has Lost Its Way on Computer Chips
When it comes to a semiconductor strategy, American policymakers don’t know which direction to turn.
Ian King
July 21, 2022, 4:00 PM GMT+8
Illustration: Travess Smalley for Bloomberg BusinessweekIn June 2021 the US Senate passed a bill dedicating more than $50 billionto increase the manufacture of semiconductors. At the time pandemic-related shortages in computer chips were highlighting US vulnerability to supply chain shocks, just as rising tension with China heightened national security concerns over technology. Bolstering domestic capacity to make components with such profound economic and strategic importance seemed like an easy win for officials across the political spectrum.
Over a year later that money—the centerpiece of a bill called the Chips Act—still hasn’t been deployed. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said his party won’t support a bill to do so unless the Democrats abandon plans for spending on climate and other issues. The Democrats, whose broader agenda has stalled anyway, are preparing a slimmed-down version for an imminent vote, and GOP leadership seems ready to support it.
The legislative momentum could yet give way to another round of inertia—considering the performance of Congress in recent years, it’s a decent bet that something such as this would happen. Either way, the delay and uncertainty have shown that Washington is not prepared to act with an urgency that matches its rhetoric. “The rest of the world is moving on with this,” says Bruce Andrews, chief government affairs officer at Intel Corp.“Other countries are aggressively recruiting. They’re providing incentives. They’re rolling out the red carpet.”
Silicon Valley is literally named after the stuff that semiconductors are made of, but the real action in the chip industry now mostly happens elsewhere. About 12% of chips are manufactured domestically, down from 37% in the 1990s, and the US lacks the ability to produce the most advanced components at scale. Intel does most of its manufacturing in the US, primarily in Oregon, Arizona, and New Mexico. It’s also planning to build a large facility in Ohio. But the rising stars are Asian heavyweights like Samsung Electronics Co., which overtook Intel as the biggest chipmaker by revenue last year, and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., which is on track to surpass Intel in 2023.
The governments of China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan have all prioritized localizing production, offering incentives that make it at least 30% cheaper to set up plants in their countries than in the US, according to Intel Chief Executive Officer Pat Gelsinger. Those subsidies have helped shift most advanced manufacturing to Asia. The European Union is also working on a new package of incentives for chipmakers.
US policymakers have never been as enthusiastic about pursuing a full-throated industrial policy as their peers in Asia and Europe. Centrists and conservative officials profess faith in market forces to allocate resources and are loath to act in ways that appear to interfere with them. The left doesn’t object to government intervention but opposes policies it sees as corporate welfare: Former US Secretary of Labor Robert Reich recently described the Chips Act as “ pure extortion.”
At the same time the US is trying to increase manufacturing of its own advanced chips, it’s trying to ensure that China can’t get so good it can develop the most advanced semiconductors on its own. Officials seem to be working at cross-purposes there, too.
A major plank of US strategy has been to cut off Chinese companies from the tools needed to produce advanced tech. The US used this weapon to great effect against Huawei Technologies Co. in 2019 when it banned the export of US components to the company. Since then it’s imposed more such restrictions. In December 2020 the US Department of Commerce announced it was putting Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp., China’s largest chipmaker, and over 60 other Chinese companies on the so-called entity list, the department’s roster of institutions that pose potential national security threats. Being on the list hindered access to machinery needed to make more advanced chips. (A draft of the bill lawmakers are currently voting on includes restrictions on companies that receive federal assistance from investing in China and Russia, a person familiar with the matter told Bloomberg News.)
The chip industry likes manufacturing subsidies but is less enthusiastic about restrictions on whom it does business with. Chinese orders for chip-manufacturing equipment from overseas suppliers rose 58% in 2021, making the country the biggest market for those products for a second year running, according to data from industry group Semi. Chip-equipment makers and some semiconductor manufacturers have lobbied hard against broad restrictions, arguing that limiting their revenue will weaken their ability to fund future innovation, thus harming US competitiveness. If China continues to have access to US technology on which it is reliant, their argument goes, it will have little incentive to undertake the long and expensive process of building the capacity to manufacture it on its own.
The Commerce Department has internalized this argument, focusing only on companies that are already on the entity list instead of pursuing broader restrictions against Chinese companies. In doing so, the department is effectively positioning such restrictions as a way to punish bad actors rather than as a policy tool in the greater US-China rivalry. “I don’t think anyone would want the US government to dip into the private-sector supply chain and try to micromanage it if nothing wrong is happening,” Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo told Bloomberg News in June.
Hawks say this approach undermines the goal of preventing China from developing advanced semiconductors. “It’s one of the industries that can’t compete via free-market notions,” says Florida Senator Marco Rubio.
A way to address objections from US companies is to pressure competitors based in allied nations to cut off the supply of chipmaking technology to China, too. The US, for instance, has been pushing the Netherlands to ban ASML Holding NV from providing China with the equipment essential to older semiconductors. But the approach to chip diplomacy has been inconsistent, with the pursuit of different priorities leading to paralysis. The US has succeeded in the first step toward solving its semiconductor problem, which is to admit that it has one. Several years after doing so, it’s having trouble getting to step two. —With Daniel Flatley and Zach C. Cohen
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