How does it actually compare to other industries, namely defense, aerospace and oil. These are all capital intensive, and if you want to be generous re the term "building", some of those refineries and shipyards are gigantic.
> How does it actually compare to other industries, namely defense, aerospace and oil.
The $12 billion given as the cost for TSMC's new Phoenix fab would buy you approximately 1 new Ford-class American aircraft carrier or a ~10% share in Canada's oil extraction industry.
Chip manufacturing really is the industrial big leagues.
And that's the bullshit, $30,000-toilet seat, parts-manufactured-in-every-congressional-district, Defense Contractor Special™ price. It should really buy you three or four aircraft carriers.
Yeah the Ford-class is obnoxiously overpriced. There is no way the key metrics of an aircraft carrier (sustained sortie generation rate, survivability, long-term maintenance) improved by the leaps-and-bounds necessary to justify tripling the price compared to a late-model Nimitz-class.
The last Nimitz-class carrier, CVN-77, cost $6.2 billion and was ordered in 2001, while the Ford cost $13 billion and was ordered in 2008. After adjustment for inflation in that period, it's only about 1.5x as expensive.
Communist states managed aerospace, defence and oil. But they failed to make modern computer chips even after trying, instead they started importing computers from capitalist countries.
Even worse: There was an export embargo for computers by the West, so the soviet union had to reverse engineer western chips and manufacture their own.
