April 23, 2025 • 44 mins
One of the stated goals for the current trade war is to build more industrial capacity in the United States. So far there doesn't seem to be much of it happening. In fact, all of the manufacturing surveys (and all evidence) so far suggests the reverse. But not that long ago there was a concerted effort to build more factories in the United States. Under President Biden there was a whole host of new industrial announcements funded in part via the CHIPS Act and the Inflation Reduction Act. But did we get anything from these bills? Do we have anything to show for it? Why is building more capacity in the United States so difficult? On this episode, we spoke with Hassan Khan, who recently left his position as the director of economic security in the CHIPS Program Office at the Department of Commerce, about what he learned, what he saw, what could be done differently, and what the results are actually were.
Read more:
With US Chips Act Money Mostly Divvied Up, the Real Test Begins
TSMC’s Arizona Chip Production Yields Surpass Taiwan’s
US Chip Grants in Limbo as Lutnick Pushes Bigger Investments
Only Bloomberg.com subscribers can get the Odd Lots newsletter in their inbox — now delivered every weekday — plus unlimited access to the site and app. Subscribe at bloomberg.com/subscriptions/oddlots
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio News.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast.
Speaker 3 (00:21):
I'm Joe Wisenthal and I'm Tracy Alloway.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Tracy, I just wrote about this in our newsletter like
five minutes ago. But it drives me nuts. How on
all of the talk about reindustrialization of America everyone had
just completely memory hold, like twenty twenty two and twenty
twenty three.
Speaker 3 (00:38):
Well, this is the amazing thing, right, We did have
a big investment program actually announced under the Biden administration,
like huge amounts of money, billions of dollars, and no
one seems to be talking about it that much, or
at least a very important segment seems to be ignoring it,
and that is the Trump administration. Trump. I think he
(01:01):
said before that he thought it was a horrible policy.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (01:05):
I suspect the reason he thinks it's horrible is because
it was a Biden thing. But it is also amazing
that like even this, even making more semiconductors in the US,
ended up being politicized and a sort of culture war issue.
Speaker 4 (01:21):
It's just crazy to me.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
It's totally insane to me, of all these influencers and
LARPers or so we need to bring back physical manufacturing
and national security, etc. As if this hasn't been a
dominant thing in US discourse for years, is if there
weren't literally battery and chip factories being announced almost every day.
Throw at twenty twenty two and twenty twenty three, all
across the US. It was not just a program. It
(01:45):
was like an actual like breaking ground and new things
were going up and dollars spent by the private sector
partially to get public subsidies, et cetera. You could certainly
say that it was like badly designed, or that it
was wrong, or there were too many rules whatever, like
all you know, that's all of this is fair play.
But the idea that suddenly this is just some new
(02:07):
impulse and not like something that's real, existing reindustrialization that's
going on, I find it infuriating or at the very
least very annoying.
Speaker 3 (02:17):
Shall we fix that, Joe, Let's fix it.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
Well, we should talk about what actually happened, right, because
it does seem like, either literally or de facto or
dejerie or whatever, the plug is being pulled on a
lot of these different programs, and now there's talk about
industrialization but the hope is that tariffs themselves spur all
of this domestic investment in physical things for people to
(02:39):
do assembly line jobs, et cetera. But we should learn
a little bit more.
Speaker 3 (02:44):
We should talk about what trips actually are as well,
because you know, yes, boost manufacturing in the US, create
new jobs, spur some private investment, sort of public private idea,
But there are a lot of different like threads that
you can pull here into in terms of the actual goals.
Speaker 2 (03:01):
Well, we should learn a little bit more about what
the Chips program actually was, and I it does still exist,
but I'm not really sure if it seems like it's
more of a husk than it was. We're going to
be speaking with someone we know very well, someone we've
known on the internet a long time, someone who even
came on Odd Lots one several years ago, who actually
worked in the Chips Program office. We were speaking with
(03:22):
Hussan Khan. He was the director of Economic Security at
the Chips Program Office. I believe he's officially left the
job so he could talk now about what he saw
inside Hustin. Thank you so much for coming back on
Odd Lots Joe Tracy.
Speaker 4 (03:39):
It's always a pleasure you know your intro there. I
feel very similarly. I really do feel like we forgot
about what was accomplished in honestly less than two years,
so excited to talk about it. What are you tells us?
Speaker 2 (03:51):
What did you do as the Director of Economic Security
at the Chips Program Office? What was that job?
Speaker 4 (03:57):
So if you look at why we passed the Chips
and Science Act, Congress and the President came together and said,
our reliance on offshore manufacturing for semiconductors presents both an
economic and national security threat. And we saw that play
out in real time during the pandemic. When we couldn't
(04:18):
make cars, we couldn't make a whole host of goods.
Prices went up that posed an economic security threat because
people were losing their jobs. Obviously there's a national security
angle as well, because we were reliant on overseas factories
for chips that go into military equipment. And as the
Director of Economic Security, my role was for it was
sort of twofold first, helping sort of set the strategy.
(04:40):
What was our vision for what we wanted to accomplish
with the Chips Program Office. So before I joined, we
published a vision for success paper in February of twenty
twenty three. I'm actually quite astonished. I think very few
people who talk about chips actually read that paper, and
I still think it's worth reading because it laid out
a roadmap for what we wanted to do within the
different categories. And then the second job that I had
was helping our teams understand the value of each proposed
(05:05):
project to US economic security. So why would the factory
that X company is proposing improve our economic security? And
obviously there are different ways in which you can do that,
whether that's advancing technological capabilities, improving supply chain resilience, plugging
various gaps in the supply chain, et cetera, et cetera.
And that's why we did sort of a deal by
deal analysis on those metrics. But it was really that
(05:26):
twofold going not just strategically across the portfolio, but on
a deal by deal basis.
Speaker 3 (05:32):
I wanted to ask you about exactly this because I
imagine there are trade offs when you're deciding what or
who to fund. Do you fund stuff that's going to
have the most immediate impact make headlines, or do you
finance stuff that maybe it takes longer to build but
it's going to have a bigger effect on the economy
or national security. If you're looking at two pitches on
(05:54):
your desk or I guess it was an online application
like a portal, but you're looking at those applications and
one is for building I don't know, in video GPUs
and the other is like making an improvement on basic
chips that go into MCUs and cars or whatever, lagging
versus leading. How do you decide between those different proposals.
Speaker 4 (06:16):
So, Tracy, that's a great question, and I would say
what complicated that decision making process was when the bill
was passed in August of twenty twenty two, we were
solely focused as a country on the impact of shortages.
And then it was in November of twenty twenty two
that chat GPT came out and suddenly the conversation shifted
(06:37):
very rapidly to AI supremacy. So in real time, you know,
if you ask Congressman why are you passing this bill,
they would have said, well, we can't have these car shutdowns,
or we can't have car factory shutting down. Appliances are
too expensive. And then by early twenty twenty three, it
was what we have to win the AI race so
we sat back as an office and we really said,
we don't want to be chasing just one category. And
(07:00):
I think again our strategy was, we want to make
sure we're making investments across the entire supply chain. So
we said, hey, we're going to functionally target a majority
of our funding, the vast majority of our funding towards
the leading edge. Why those are the most expensive facilities.
So Intel, TSMC, Samsung and Micron between them got nearly
twenty eight twenty nine billion dollars and don't you know,
you can check my math afterwards. Knowing that getting those
(07:24):
facilities in the United States at the scale that they
were investing in has downstream consequences too, because now you're
building out the supply chain necessary for the entire industry,
and that spills over to some of the other facilities
that are going to come up online. We did have
a statutory requirement to invest at least two billion dollars
in what we're called legacy node chips, and our office
spend a lot of time trying to understand what our
(07:47):
strategy could be on shoring up legacy supply. So we
made investments, you know, large ones in TI and global
foundries that are in the sort of meat of the
legacy node supply chain. But we also made actually dozens
of investments that I think at short shrift because they
just aren't as headline grabbing, but they plugged up a
lot of our capabilities in rf in power, summi conductors,
(08:09):
the sort of un sexy types of electronics that are
critical not just for infrastructure today but infrastructure in the future.
And how we thought about trade offs. I think the
way we tried to think about it was we really
tried to bucket our funds and say, hey, for the
leading edge, we want to be able to say, preserve
x amount of our budget. It was about that twenty
eight billion dollars for the leading edge and make sure
(08:31):
that we retain sufficient funding on the back end for
the legacy nodes, for advanced packaging, for the supply chain,
because we knew that we needed to make investments across
the entire supply chain just get to the resilience. That was,
you know, the reason that the bill was passed.
Speaker 2 (08:46):
All right, I have a question, and you could just
be totally honest, you know, I'll give it to one
of the criticisms of Biden era industrial policy that is
frequently made from our abundance brothers and sisters, is that yes,
there were all of these efforts, but you know, you
couldn't get the money unless you had a certain amount
of workforce diversity, and you had to do a land
(09:08):
acknowledgment on where you were going to build the factory,
and also you had to have like childcare, etc. And
it's like, well, do you want to build the chip
plant or not? Because if you do, then why did
you put all of these other burdens that have nothing
to do with building chips per se onto the money?
In your experience, what is the role of these other
elements in the speed of grant programs or project development
(09:33):
in the US?
Speaker 4 (09:35):
I know this is a topic that gets Frankly, I
think it gets way too much air time. And I'll
tell you why. First, there were statutory requirements that came
from Congress on what the proposals had to be. Right.
So Congress themselves came and said, hey, if you're making
a project proposal, you need to have opportunity and inclusion
language or what your commitments are to community investments. If
(09:58):
you look at the DFAs that we write, the direct
funding agreements, the terms that we had around what you
might call everything. Bagel policy basically codified the commitments the
firms themselves had made to the communities that they were
investing in. It essentially said, hey, you told the community
that you were going to be investing in, you know,
the schools or water reclamation projects, whatever those community investment
(10:20):
funds could be. All we're doing is memorializing that commitment
that you've made. Secondly, on childcare, this is another one
that first in terms of the amount of funding that
we put towards it, I think it was a total
of about ten million dollars across the thirty nine billion, Okay,
So it was never a focus. It never became in
(10:40):
any of the negotiations that I set in a discussion
where the company came back and said, hey, we really
want to build this plant, but the million dollars that
you're giving us for childcare and the requirements that you
have simply aren't enough. Many of these firms are investing
in child care facilities for their workers anyways, and you
see it like there's Wall Street Journal report a few
months ago about a company that wanted to expand and
with new workers that were mostly coming from like Hispanic background,
(11:03):
and they found that the biggest thing they could do
to help bring them on was have childcare on site,
because their workers were like, I can't come to the
office because I don't have a place to leave my kids.
So it's just it's actually what the private sector is
doing anyway, And oftentimes the funding that we brought to
those initiatives actually helped them think outside the box and
think across firms to come up with regional solutions that
(11:24):
scaled better than they would on a firm by firm basis.
I will say, however, where I think critics of sort
of the everything bagel approach do have a point is
whereas a lot of the terms that I just described
were not deal stoppers. They didn't slow down negotiations, they
weren't the points of contention where there are points of
contention between different stakeholders, I think you need top leadership
(11:46):
to be able to come and say our number one
goal is to get the factory built, and various stakeholders
have to get in line. And where I'm talking about
stakeholders is where I think the abundance folks also speak
to them, groups like labor and environment, right, you have
to come and say, hey, do we want this project
to happen? There will inevitably be trade offs. There is
no world in which you can build a massive factory
(12:08):
and have zero environmental impact. Right. You have to also
even in the context of labor, we have to understand
that this is a globally competitive industry, and so the
demands that labor is making have to be viewed from
the context of like what does it take for the
factories in the US to be globally competitive? And I
think you need top leadership to come and say we're
(12:30):
not going to allow concerns that are being raised by
the community to sort of halt negotiation. So there is
a balance to be struck in terms of what's our
number one goal. Is it to get the factory done
or is it to make sure that no one's upset
at the fact that the factory is getting done.
Speaker 3 (13:03):
Give us a sense of the actual timeline for the
application process, like how quickly could you actually approve things
on average? And then I'm curious, like what was the
longest negotiation that you had and what were the sticking
points there?
Speaker 4 (13:19):
Okay, so the process the way it worked, you first
had to submit a what's called the statement of interest,
and this was honestly like a one to two paragraph
submission via Salesforce portal that basically said, we are from
company why, and we want to build a manufacturing plant
for semiconductors in Excity. It did not require a lot
of details that basically, you know, it puts you on
(13:42):
the map of our office to say, hey, we should
go and talk to these people and understand what they're
really trying to build. Then we had what we called
a pre app process, and we can come back to
that in just a moment my thoughts on the process,
but it essentially said, hey, submit a simplified version of
your final application and we'll give you some preliminary a
feedback kind of like a draft application, and will help
(14:03):
identify where we think on our scoring rubric you need
to make adjustments in order to score better. By the way,
our response to the pre app was non binding, so
if we basically said hey we don't like your pre app,
you could still apply and submit a full application. But
you know, we did take into consideration whether or not
you responded to the feedback from the pre app. The
full application was sort of your final submission. We started
(14:25):
to receive for our first full applications in the late
summer early fall of twenty twenty three, and so you
saw we got to a first preliminary announcement by the
end of twenty twenty three with BAE. So it took us,
you know, on the order of about a little more
than a quarter to get through a first full announcement.
The exact longest negotiations that it took, I have to
(14:49):
think back for a moment, but we had one final
step after the preliminary announcement following sort of exactly how
you do it in the private equity world, you know,
have a preliminary announcement saying, hey, we intend to make
this investment, we intend to go forward with this, but
it's subject to due diligence and i'd be the direct
funding agreement. Those negotiations did drag on through twenty twenty four,
and I think a lot of it came down to
(15:10):
sort of dotting the eyes and crossing the t's on
what did it mean for the government and semiconductor firms
to make a commitment to each other on these facilities. Right,
There was a lot of not on the sort of
everything bagel terms, but there was a lot of negotiation
and what does it mean if your company is sold?
What does it mean if you violate guardrails statutory requirements? Right?
(15:32):
We really had to work through that because we'd never
worked through it as a country before with firms at
this scale. But what you saw routinely was as we
reached a milestone, So as we reached the first preliminary
memorandum of terms and we reached the first direct funding agreement,
the second, third, fourth agreements would happen much faster because
we at that point had worked out a template and
could say, hey, here's how other firms are thinking about
(15:53):
doing it. There's already comfort with this format. Let's try
and you work off that, and you saw them happen
in rapid succession.
Speaker 2 (16:01):
I want to go back to what you said we're
talking about earlier, that the abundance people do have some
sort of point when it comes to environmental and labor stakeholders.
What did you see specifically? Now you don't have to
like identify the names of the projects, but look, these
are different parts of the Democratic Party constituency. Late, I'll
(16:23):
say this, the Democratic Party really wants to be liked
by organized labor. I don't know if the organized labor,
especially in the private sector, is a big Democratic constituents anymore.
But Democratic Party certainly wants to be liked by organized labor.
They certainly want people who concern about the environment talk
to us about the reality of how these different impulses
can collide with each other.
Speaker 4 (16:44):
So I think we have to take one step back
and be honest about where we stand in terms of
our manufacturing competitiveness. Right. I think they're a broad understanding
that we are no longer at the frontier in a
range of industries, and so what is it going to
take for us to catch up to the frontier and
be globally competitive again? We have cost disadvantages to operating
(17:07):
in this country, it takes longer to build. We do have,
you know, existing regulatory frameworks that can complicate some of
these projects, right. So, I think one of the consequences
of this tension of there's an urgency to move fast,
an urgency to catch up to our geopolitical competitors, but
(17:27):
not really a readiness to sort of tear down the
frameworks that we had. And I think for good reason,
you have to come back and say, well, what is
it going to take for us to catch up and
so on. A lot of these projects, you saw environmental
groups raising concerns on you know, pollution impacts. You saw
labor groups sort of saying, hey, unions are being left
out in the cold. And I would come back and say,
I think a lot of that really was noise because
(17:48):
there was like an open negotiation going on sometimes through
the media where these various groups were trying to say, hey,
make sure you don't forget about us. But I do
also think for policy, you have to be able to
come out and say what is the most important thing.
Is it for the factory to get done on time,
or is it that we leverage union labor or is
(18:12):
it that we make no impact to the environment. And
there will be times in every complex project in the
public or private sector, you have to make trade offs
between different objective functions, and I think for what we
saw was there was like an unwillingness sometimes to really
say to stakeholders, hey, we hear your needs, but they're
(18:34):
gonna be second priority in order to get the project
done right. And that complicates the discussion on how are
we going to get these things done quickly? And I
think there was a tension between the urgency that firms
and folks within the Chips Program Office felt, and outside
stakeholders who really were saying, well, don't forget about us.
Speaker 3 (18:55):
So you mentioned a bunch of competitive disadvantages that the
US has, you know, things like we're starting from a
lower base at least in terms of manufacturing, higher labor costs,
more rules and regulations, whether it's about the environment or
something else. Do we have any competitive advantages? I'm actually
struggling here, but there must be something.
Speaker 4 (19:18):
You know. Okay, so I think maybe not? No, I
do we do? Right? We have? If you think about it,
the world's most advanced firms were all designing the best
chips in the world. They're all based in the US.
We have the best university system, so we have a
deep talent pipeline. We have a tech stack than in
the United States, I think is unparalleled anywhere else. But
when it comes to being able to build a factory,
(19:41):
you know, I like to use the analogy of we
basically stopped going to the gym. Do you know before
the TSMC fab came online in late twenty twenty four,
when the last leading edge fab in the United States
was built, came online, No it's good. What is it?
Speaker 2 (19:54):
What's the answer?
Speaker 4 (19:55):
Twenty thirteen. So for basically a decade, we stopped building large,
leading edge fabs in the United States, and so the
muscle for how to build those factories atrophied. And that
doesn't just mean construction workers, like obviously all those people
went and probably found jobs elsewhere, but it also means
for the regulatory apparatus for what does it mean to
(20:15):
understand the environmental impacts of these facilities? And so when
you talk about the delays in construction, oftentimes those delays
are from the permitting processes that are handled at the
state and local level. Well, in a lot of the
places that we're building these facilities, state and local regulators
hadn't seen a facility like this before because we hadn't
been building them in over a decade, and so they
didn't know what the impacts were, and you know, it
(20:38):
required an education process. And I think a lot of
the noise that we heard in the last two years
was because we were kind of starting this again after
not going to the gym for over a decade. And
you know what happens when you don't go to the gym,
you go back one time you're really really sore the
next day, but if you keep going, your body kind
of gets used to it. And that's why, for example,
(20:58):
take TSMC's FABS in Arizona, you don't hear the same
noise about labor unions or permitting concerns over Fab two
because the entire system sort of got into shape, right.
And I think if the chips program off is going
to be looked at as a success, it's going to
be because the second, third, fourth, fifth facilities that are
(21:19):
being built at these sites are showing rates of learning
in how long it takes for them to get brought online,
brought up to speed, brought up to a similar capacity
to what they have and their overseas benchmarks. So I
would look at it's like the first fabs are like
a proof of concept, can we do this? And it's
really in the second, third, fourth fabs at these local
(21:39):
projects that you'll start to see the ecosystems of the church.
Speaker 2 (21:57):
I asked earlier about whether environmentalists in unions are restraint.
Something else that I'm very interested in is you mentioned,
you know, the top semiconductor companies in the world are
actually in the United States. We just don't really make them,
but we design them, and that's actually much more valuable.
And in Nvidia is a much more valuable company than TSMC,
(22:18):
the legendary TSMC. And so, you know, I've been writing
about for a while like how much of this is
an issue of capitalism? And investors in semiconductor companies don't
want US manufacturing because that's lower margins. You move that overseas,
et cetera. You don't want design and fabrication in house
(22:38):
together because then you mix a high margin company with
a low margin company, et cetera. Obviously, to some extent,
the idea of using public money is to solve this problem.
But just when you're look in general at the questions
of US manufacturing and high tech areas or whatever, how
much is it about capitalist incentives.
Speaker 4 (22:55):
I do think there is a tension here. I know
you've covered this as well. You saw TI, which is
engaging in one of the most aggressive expansions in the
United States, hoping to build seven fabs by the middle
of next decade. Overall, had activist investors basically pressuring them
to reduce their capital investments. And there is a tension
where shareholders are going to say, hey, you could return
(23:17):
money to me that would have better and I could
go use it in other use cases. Yeah, I mean famously,
look at the case of Intel, which for a long
time was returning a lot of cash to shareholders through
dividends and stock buybacks and fell behind the leading edge curve.
So that tension is absolutely real. But I do think
firms and investors understand the value of having these facilities.
(23:39):
I think the challenges creating a structure where the government
can help equalize the returns so that the private value
is similar to the public value. Let me put it
in another way, the government highly values these manufacturing facilities being
in the United States for the economic and national security
reasons I laid out above, right, But private shareholders don't
(24:01):
value them as much. But there are levers that we
can pull to help make them look more attractive. And
I think the biggest under discuss lever was the Investment
tax credit. Right. The investment tax credit is a twenty
five percent tax credit for firms that invest in manufacturing
in the United States. I think there's a world where
the future of industrial policy I'm putting quotes around that
(24:23):
really comes and says, hey, the focus should be on
tax credits that give firms certainty on what their cost
structure and return structure is going to look like for
capital investments made in the United States, and maybe the
disbursement funding that's subject to review by bureaucrats is a
smaller pot that is really geared towards firms that have
(24:45):
capital shortcomings or capital concerns. Right, So, I think you
could plausibly make the claim that the intels and tsmcs
of the world don't necessarily need cash from the government
because what they're optimizing for is like an NPV function
on their capital investments, and tax credits can solve all
of that, in fact, can happen with less government intervention.
(25:06):
But there are smaller firms who really do need cash
infusions in order to bring, you know, to bridge the
value of death that we've been talking about for decades
in this country but never really had an approach to SAULT.
And I think there's a slim down version of industrial
policy in the future that really focuses on ay tax
credits can equalize our cost structure and make investments attractive
where you know, we take target smaller amounts of funding
(25:29):
to critical technologies that we want to make sure happen
in the United States.
Speaker 3 (25:33):
So on this note, I mean one of the discussions
that inevitably pops up when you're doing this type of
policy is public versus private and the sort of crowding
in or crowding out effect on private capital. I imagine
that part of the intent of the Chips Act was
to encourage private investors to get excited about not only
(25:56):
you know, the importance of manufacturing here in the US,
but also the potential returns. To your point about the
tax credit, did you see a change in behavior on
the part of private investors. Did you ever talk to
them about, you know, what their concerns were or what
they wanted to see from this program. And were you successful,
(26:16):
I guess in making chips manufacturing cool again.
Speaker 4 (26:20):
I think we were. I think the Investment Office, led
by Todd Fisher, did a lot of outreach to the
investment community broadly to help them understand not just our approach,
but how we were working with firms to make these
investments more attractive in the United States. And you know,
I think there's a broad recognition that being able to
(26:40):
build industrial capacity in the US has benefits beyond just
the balance sheet. That being said, I do think it's
an ongoing discussion with the investment community on how do
we build certainty in these you know, government programs. Right. So,
the the biggest thing that the Chips Program Office did
(27:02):
was it gave firms confidence in what their returns would
look like if they invested in the US because they
had a tax credit and award dollars that would come
to them, and they could go to their investors and say, hey, look,
there is a cost disadvantage, but we feel confident that
we'll be able to reduce it with the public dollars
that are coming in. And I really think the biggest
(27:23):
lever that the government can pull is giving firms certainty
when they're making twenty to hundred billion dollar investments, because
they don't want to be caught on the wrong side
by a policy change that now gets them underwater on
a facility that's half done, And the sunk costs of
building a facility and half getting it half equipped are
(27:43):
really large, and so I think that is the challenge
for a lot of these firms and for investors. They
want to be able to say, hey, is what we're
modeling really going to hold in the long term from
a cost structure basis for us to feel comfortable in
what the returns are going to be.
Speaker 2 (27:59):
I just have one last question myself, is what was accomplished?
We don't know what the future is or maybe you
can give some insight into what is going on at
CHIPS today in April twenty twenty five. But you said
at the beginning about like what was accomplished during CHIPS
And I'm aware the projects have been started and some
have been completed, et cetera. But what did we get
(28:19):
from all of these efforts and should we be happy
with it?
Speaker 4 (28:23):
So if the top line number that you know, we
used while the Biden administration was still around was four
hundred and fifty billion dollars in announced investment, and you
started to see this with the data from the Census
showed that we were making more investments in electronics facilities
construction spend in twenty twenty three and twenty twenty four
than we had in the last two decades combined.
Speaker 2 (28:45):
What about like actual like production? What I care about
is actual things to go into computers, cars.
Speaker 4 (28:51):
And one hundred percent. So we got to recognize too,
right that these are not going to happen overnight. These
facilities aren't going to over The bill was passed in
August of twenty twenty two, right, so within a couple
of years you had you know, four hundred, like I said,
four and fifty billion dollars if investments announced. And I
think the biggest thing is that firms have to feel
comfortable moving forward with those plans. So let's take TSMC
(29:14):
as an example. TSMC, by the end of the Biden
administration has started pumping chips out for Apple and AMD
out of its facility in Arizona. And as it continues
to move forward with the second and third facilities, that
ecosystem is going to mature to the point where the
cost differentials versus Taiwan are going to be reduced. The
scale is going to bring more suppliers on shore, so
(29:35):
they're going to have more of their coems and their
gases and their you know, consumable materials sourced from the
United States. And as that happens, you start to you know,
build out a broader ecosystem because you know, we heard
all the time from suppliers who were saying, Hey, we're
building a facility in the United States to service all
the fabs that are coming online. Because we can now
(29:56):
justify the investment based off of the number of downstream
investments that have been made. And as they build out
their facilities, then their suppliers are going to come here.
So I think there's going to be an ecosystem maturation
that's going to continue, hopefully through the rest of the decade.
That's going to bring not just you know, front end
fabrication facilities, but their suppliers facilities and then their suppliers
(30:18):
suppliers facilities, And now you talk about getting the sort
of industrial ecosystems that really had atrophy in the United States.
And when you start to go you know, N plus
two in terms of the supplier level, you're no longer
just serving the semiconductor industry. You're building fabricated machine parts
that go into semiconductor manufacturing equipment and also going to
say airplanes or automobiles, and you now you know, buttress
(30:41):
the entire industrial ecosystem, even though you're starting from just
building semiconductor manufacturing plants. Right. So I think that is
what the long term is going to look like. But
we have to you know, in this where I have
to come back to the point on we have to
also be honest about where we were right. We weren't
building these fabs. There's a reason it took so long,
(31:01):
and it's not going to happen overnight. And if we're
not willing to maintain the investments and the programs that
we have, I think a lot of firms are going
to say, Hey, the uncertainty isn't worth it for me
to continue to invest. Because I can't go to my
shareholders and say this investment has a solid return. They're
going to look at it and they're gonna discount it
(31:22):
with all that uncertainty and pressure me to not make
these investments, or to reduce the investments I make and
focus on places where the returns are much more solid.
I think that's the situation that we absolutely should avoid.
And you even hear that from the Trump administration, where,
for example, Jade Vance at a speech at the American
Dynamism Conference talked about making adjustments to tax credits for
(31:42):
firms in terms of bonus appreciation and the R and
D tax credit, those are very much in line with
making these investments less risky for firms the United States.
So if the Trump administration continues down that vein, I
think you'll see firms feel confident that they can expand
these investments and build out these ecosystems to a a
size and scale that's globally competitive. Right. And then you
(32:04):
tap into the broader tech stack that we have here,
where now the smartest engineers from Nvidia, Apple, and am
D don't have to fly to Taiwan. They can fly
to Arizona to make sure that they're getting their designs
taped out correctly, and they're working with universities all across
the United States on future designs and technologies. And then
you get an industrial ecosystem that really leverages our capabilities. Right.
(32:27):
One last point on this one. I think a lot
of people made this criticism when the Chips Act was
passed that the United States should have just continued to
invest in R and D and that's what we should leverage.
We should leverage our R and D capabilities. But here's
another trivia question for the two of you. When was
the quiz?
Speaker 2 (32:46):
Right now? So actually we're going to use these and
just we're putting on a trivia event. So we're going
to use your questions and turn them into questions.
Speaker 4 (32:52):
All right, keep going, I'll send you some When was
the first EUV machine installed in the United States. It
was two thousand and six at Sunny Albany, which is
the nanotech complex in upstate New York. We didn't have
high volume manufacturing with an EUV machine until December of
(33:12):
twenty twenty four out of TSMC eighteen years, right, So
I think the critics who said we should double down
on R and D actually failed to grapple with the
fact that the R and D first approach was empirically failing. US.
We invented EUV technology through our DD National Labs and
(33:33):
in partnership with ASML, we installed the first alpha tools
in both Europe and the United States. And then, I
mean the United States was a half decade behind East
Asia in bringing EUV manufacturing to scale, right, so that
formula wasn't working. And one of the shortages that TSMC
talked about was that they didn't have enough workers who
(33:54):
knew how to install and bring up EUV machines. So
you can see how this sort of scades the ecosystem atrophies.
And then when firms come and try to do foreign
direct investment, they come and say, well, you don't have
the skills that we need, even though we can point
to all the R and D investments, and I think
the problem was we were sort of making these R
and D investments in a vacuum and kind of hoping
that they'd get sucked into an industrial ecosystem that, you know,
(34:18):
despite what a lot of economists say about America still
having a very high value add for manufacturing, you look
on the ground and there are tons of anecdotes that
the manufacturing ecosystem has atrophied and we have to make
investments in order to bring it back up to be
globally competitive. And I think an anecdote exactly like the
delay in bringing EUV manufacturing to scale in the US,
(34:38):
exemplifies why the old approach wasn't working. And we can
debate like what the right ways are and how industrial
policy should be structured, and what tax credits, etc. Need
to be done, and trade reforms need to be done,
but I don't think you can debate whether or not
the old you know, let's call it pre twenty twenty
approach was actually maintaining America's industrial competitiveness, because it wasn't.
Speaker 3 (35:03):
I have just one more question, and that is what's
next for the Chips Program Office itself? Because I mean,
under the Trump administration, fiscal spending doesn't really seem to
be very popular, to put it mildly, and there's obviously
a bon fight over who gets to control the pocketbook
of America, whether it's Congress or the president. At the
(35:24):
same time, we have DOGE, which is implementing sweeping changes
on the government itself, you know, entire agencies going away
and stuff like that. And then finally, the other thing
happening which we should definitely ask about, is tariffs. Right,
and maybe tariffs end up being good for domestic manufacturing
like semiconductors, but I can imagine that there are also
(35:48):
still either components or materials that chips manufacturing actually needs
to import. So I guess my question is, how are
you weighing all these different things that are going on
right now?
Speaker 4 (36:00):
Now?
Speaker 3 (36:00):
What do they mean for the actual Chips Act and
for manufacturing.
Speaker 4 (36:04):
So let me give you one one small anecdote to
show you how firms are trying to understand what's happening. Right,
I was talking to a supplier that wants to build
a facility outside of Arizona. Right, they're exemplifying that ecosystem
development that I talked about that's coming out of TSMC's investment.
And I was on a call with them in late
March and they basically said, we don't understand what's happening.
(36:27):
We don't know what our cost structure is going to
look like, and you know, our project is undergoing change
constantly because our cost structure is undergoing change. So, you know,
for a lot of these firms, before they're willing to
make bets that you know, in some of these smaller
firms can be like, you know, life or death size
bets for the firm, they really want to have an
(36:49):
understanding of what the policy framework is going to look like.
And I think we have to sort of get through
the period of you know, a new headline rocking markets
every day or it to shake out to understand how
it'll affect the long term decisions a lot for a
lot of these firms. You know, the sense I got
from talking to that firm and from other firms was
that they're going to kind of wait it out and
see They're going to try and buy as much time
(37:10):
as they can to see where things reach a steady
state before reevaluating their investment plans. I think on the
flip side, However, there is a bipartisan agreement on the
need to bring industrial manufacturing back to the United States, right,
So I think the question is going to be on
the methods by which we do it. So you know,
I go back and you say, is it through tax incentives,
(37:32):
is it through trade policy? Is it through industrial policy?
I think all of those tools interact with each other. Obviously,
different administrations have different approaches, so I don't know where
we'll end up with that. The last thing I'll say
is the methods that we developed in the Chips Program
Office for trying to get firms comfortable with making investments
in the United States and working to accelerate their investments
(37:54):
by working with stakeholders across you know, environment, workforce, and
other policy objectives. I think that is actually going to continue.
If you look at the Investment Accelerator Executive Order that
was announced by President Trump a few weeks back, the
sorts of activities that he's saying, the White Glove Service,
I think that was pioneered in the Chips Program Office,
where we worked with firms to get through the labor issues,
(38:17):
to get through the environmental issues, and permitting questions to
make sure that these projects could move forward. It's why
I've said repeatedly that there were no Chips Act construction
projects that were held up by Neeper review. And I
think they're going to take that recipe that was developed
and try to scale it across multiple sectors. You know,
certainly going to be different contextual challenges. But if they
do that, I think it's going to be a vote
(38:39):
in favor of the work that we were doing at
the policy level to make sure in manufacturing investments in
the United States are viable for firms, and that's going
to have to be complemented with a you know, approach
to make them financially viable. I don't know, and I
don't know that any of us can say what the
Trump administration is going to finalize its policy mix on.
And I think firms are going to wait to see
(38:59):
what that policy mix looks like from the Trump administration
before you know, placing further large bets. So if there's
a lot of policy uncertainty, you may see some companies
come out and say, hey, we're gonna do price increases
and we're gonna maybe pause equipment purchases until we really
know what the fiscal impact of tariffs or other. You know,
new trade negotiations are going to be for our project.
Speaker 2 (39:21):
Huss and con. Thank you so much for coming back
on odd Lage, and I'm sharing with us lessons that
you learned during your stint in the public sector. Thank
you for your service. I learned a lot, so appreciate
you coming back on.
Speaker 4 (39:33):
Joe Tracy. Always a pleasure. And the last thing I'll
say is, I think the CHIP was an experiment in
what industrial policy could look like. The scoreboard, the early
returns look good, but I think the real measure of
whether it was successful we'll know by the end of
the Trump administration if these other projects come on.
Speaker 2 (39:53):
Fine, all right, well have you.
Speaker 4 (40:08):
Tracy? That was really good.
Speaker 2 (40:10):
It's cool that one of our past guests like started
this whole other career between the last time we talked
to them, Yeah, which is like in maybe early twenty
twenty one, then went and got this job. And then
we've been doing this a long time and someone had
like a whole chunk of their career that they could
fill us in on between times that we talked to them.
Speaker 3 (40:26):
Yeah, that's kind of crazy. So we feel old. Yes,
On the plus side, we get an inside look at
the Chips Program Office, which is pretty cool. I do
take a Hassan's point about I guess like building up
the muscle of manufacturing and his point that, well, we
had been doing it a certain way, which is basically
all through private capital for many many years, and it
(40:49):
hasn't resulted in the purpose that we now want, which
is actually building factories to produce these things. And so
you really need some sort of catalysts to get stuff going,
to get people excited about it. Yeah, maybe change the
calculation in terms of profit margins and the result is
the Chips Act.
Speaker 2 (41:08):
I'm so depressed about the twenty tens and like, seriously,
just like the way we let everything hollow out, you know,
we talk about it with housing and sawmills and all
of this stuff that we just like didn't do when
we could have, and then the costs that imposes on
us or we haven't like build a fab in forever
and we forgot. I do think it's interesting like this
question of you know, even with TSMC's second fab or
(41:30):
you know, you don't see any of those same headlines
that you saw with the first one. That is encouraging.
Maybe you have a sort of template to quickly navigate
the state and local issues. Some of the questions around
you know, the quote stakeholders, et cetera. Which every system
has stakeholders. If this isn't not unique in that, I mean, obviously,
you know, every system has to have a way. I
(41:52):
think what's important, you know some of the I remember
we did a conversation about nuclear construction in China, and
it's like they have their own you know, it's not
like there aren't environmentalists in China, et cetera. What they
have is like a system for allocating like who wins
and what the priorities are, et cetera.
Speaker 3 (42:07):
And top down leadership.
Speaker 2 (42:09):
Yeah, there are many. Yeah, a much more sort of
straightforward system in that respect. But uh no, I thought
that was interesting, and you know, I'm hopeful that Husson
wasn't totally dooming.
Speaker 3 (42:19):
You know what they say about factories, Joe, No, the
best time to build a factory was twenty years ago. Yeah,
the second best time to build a factory is today.
Speaker 2 (42:28):
All right, Well, you know, I wonder, I wonder we're
recording this April eighth. I wonder if there's a single
new factory green broken ground today right now. I kind
of doubt it.
Speaker 3 (42:36):
Yeah, all right, shall we leave it there?
Speaker 2 (42:38):
Let's leave it there.
Speaker 3 (42:39):
This has been another episode of the odd Lots podcast.
I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway.
Speaker 2 (42:45):
And I'm Joe Wisenthal. You can follow me at the
Stalwart Fellow Husson Khan. He's at Husson Khan. Follow our
producers Carman, Rodriguez at Carmen Erman, Dash Ol Bennett at
dashbod and kel Brooks at cal Brooks. More Odd Laws content,
go to Bloomberg dot com odd Lots. We have all
of our episodes in the daily newsletter, and you can
chat about all of these topics, including semiconductors twenty four
(43:07):
to seven in our discord discord dot gg slash Oddlins.
Speaker 3 (43:11):
And if you enjoy when we talk about industrial policy
and remind everyone that the Chips Act actually exists, then
please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform.
And remember, if you are a Bloomberg subscriber, you can
listen to all of our episodes absolutely ad free. All
you need to do is find the Bloomberg channel on
Apple Podcasts and follow the instructions there. Thanks for listening,
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio News.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast.
Speaker 3 (00:21):
I'm Joe Wisenthal and I'm Tracy Alloway.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Tracy, I just wrote about this in our newsletter like
five minutes ago. But it drives me nuts. How on
all of the talk about reindustrialization of America everyone had
just completely memory hold, like twenty twenty two and twenty
twenty three.
Speaker 3 (00:38):
Well, this is the amazing thing, right, We did have
a big investment program actually announced under the Biden administration,
like huge amounts of money, billions of dollars, and no
one seems to be talking about it that much, or
at least a very important segment seems to be ignoring it,
and that is the Trump administration. Trump. I think he
(01:01):
said before that he thought it was a horrible policy.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (01:05):
I suspect the reason he thinks it's horrible is because
it was a Biden thing. But it is also amazing
that like even this, even making more semiconductors in the US,
ended up being politicized and a sort of culture war issue.
Speaker 4 (01:21):
It's just crazy to me.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
It's totally insane to me, of all these influencers and
LARPers or so we need to bring back physical manufacturing
and national security, etc. As if this hasn't been a
dominant thing in US discourse for years, is if there
weren't literally battery and chip factories being announced almost every day.
Throw at twenty twenty two and twenty twenty three, all
across the US. It was not just a program. It
(01:45):
was like an actual like breaking ground and new things
were going up and dollars spent by the private sector
partially to get public subsidies, et cetera. You could certainly
say that it was like badly designed, or that it
was wrong, or there were too many rules whatever, like
all you know, that's all of this is fair play.
But the idea that suddenly this is just some new
(02:07):
impulse and not like something that's real, existing reindustrialization that's
going on, I find it infuriating or at the very
least very annoying.
Speaker 3 (02:17):
Shall we fix that, Joe, Let's fix it.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
Well, we should talk about what actually happened, right, because
it does seem like, either literally or de facto or
dejerie or whatever, the plug is being pulled on a
lot of these different programs, and now there's talk about
industrialization but the hope is that tariffs themselves spur all
of this domestic investment in physical things for people to
(02:39):
do assembly line jobs, et cetera. But we should learn
a little bit more.
Speaker 3 (02:44):
We should talk about what trips actually are as well,
because you know, yes, boost manufacturing in the US, create
new jobs, spur some private investment, sort of public private idea,
But there are a lot of different like threads that
you can pull here into in terms of the actual goals.
Speaker 2 (03:01):
Well, we should learn a little bit more about what
the Chips program actually was, and I it does still exist,
but I'm not really sure if it seems like it's
more of a husk than it was. We're going to
be speaking with someone we know very well, someone we've
known on the internet a long time, someone who even
came on Odd Lots one several years ago, who actually
worked in the Chips Program office. We were speaking with
(03:22):
Hussan Khan. He was the director of Economic Security at
the Chips Program Office. I believe he's officially left the
job so he could talk now about what he saw
inside Hustin. Thank you so much for coming back on
Odd Lots Joe Tracy.
Speaker 4 (03:39):
It's always a pleasure you know your intro there. I
feel very similarly. I really do feel like we forgot
about what was accomplished in honestly less than two years,
so excited to talk about it. What are you tells us?
Speaker 2 (03:51):
What did you do as the Director of Economic Security
at the Chips Program Office? What was that job?
Speaker 4 (03:57):
So if you look at why we passed the Chips
and Science Act, Congress and the President came together and said,
our reliance on offshore manufacturing for semiconductors presents both an
economic and national security threat. And we saw that play
out in real time during the pandemic. When we couldn't
(04:18):
make cars, we couldn't make a whole host of goods.
Prices went up that posed an economic security threat because
people were losing their jobs. Obviously there's a national security
angle as well, because we were reliant on overseas factories
for chips that go into military equipment. And as the
Director of Economic Security, my role was for it was
sort of twofold first, helping sort of set the strategy.
(04:40):
What was our vision for what we wanted to accomplish
with the Chips Program Office. So before I joined, we
published a vision for success paper in February of twenty
twenty three. I'm actually quite astonished. I think very few
people who talk about chips actually read that paper, and
I still think it's worth reading because it laid out
a roadmap for what we wanted to do within the
different categories. And then the second job that I had
was helping our teams understand the value of each proposed
(05:05):
project to US economic security. So why would the factory
that X company is proposing improve our economic security? And
obviously there are different ways in which you can do that,
whether that's advancing technological capabilities, improving supply chain resilience, plugging
various gaps in the supply chain, et cetera, et cetera.
And that's why we did sort of a deal by
deal analysis on those metrics. But it was really that
(05:26):
twofold going not just strategically across the portfolio, but on
a deal by deal basis.
Speaker 3 (05:32):
I wanted to ask you about exactly this because I
imagine there are trade offs when you're deciding what or
who to fund. Do you fund stuff that's going to
have the most immediate impact make headlines, or do you
finance stuff that maybe it takes longer to build but
it's going to have a bigger effect on the economy
or national security. If you're looking at two pitches on
(05:54):
your desk or I guess it was an online application
like a portal, but you're looking at those applications and
one is for building I don't know, in video GPUs
and the other is like making an improvement on basic
chips that go into MCUs and cars or whatever, lagging
versus leading. How do you decide between those different proposals.
Speaker 4 (06:16):
So, Tracy, that's a great question, and I would say
what complicated that decision making process was when the bill
was passed in August of twenty twenty two, we were
solely focused as a country on the impact of shortages.
And then it was in November of twenty twenty two
that chat GPT came out and suddenly the conversation shifted
(06:37):
very rapidly to AI supremacy. So in real time, you know,
if you ask Congressman why are you passing this bill,
they would have said, well, we can't have these car shutdowns,
or we can't have car factory shutting down. Appliances are
too expensive. And then by early twenty twenty three, it
was what we have to win the AI race so
we sat back as an office and we really said,
we don't want to be chasing just one category. And
(07:00):
I think again our strategy was, we want to make
sure we're making investments across the entire supply chain. So
we said, hey, we're going to functionally target a majority
of our funding, the vast majority of our funding towards
the leading edge. Why those are the most expensive facilities.
So Intel, TSMC, Samsung and Micron between them got nearly
twenty eight twenty nine billion dollars and don't you know,
you can check my math afterwards. Knowing that getting those
(07:24):
facilities in the United States at the scale that they
were investing in has downstream consequences too, because now you're
building out the supply chain necessary for the entire industry,
and that spills over to some of the other facilities
that are going to come up online. We did have
a statutory requirement to invest at least two billion dollars
in what we're called legacy node chips, and our office
spend a lot of time trying to understand what our
(07:47):
strategy could be on shoring up legacy supply. So we
made investments, you know, large ones in TI and global
foundries that are in the sort of meat of the
legacy node supply chain. But we also made actually dozens
of investments that I think at short shrift because they
just aren't as headline grabbing, but they plugged up a
lot of our capabilities in rf in power, summi conductors,
(08:09):
the sort of un sexy types of electronics that are
critical not just for infrastructure today but infrastructure in the future.
And how we thought about trade offs. I think the
way we tried to think about it was we really
tried to bucket our funds and say, hey, for the
leading edge, we want to be able to say, preserve
x amount of our budget. It was about that twenty
eight billion dollars for the leading edge and make sure
(08:31):
that we retain sufficient funding on the back end for
the legacy nodes, for advanced packaging, for the supply chain,
because we knew that we needed to make investments across
the entire supply chain just get to the resilience. That was,
you know, the reason that the bill was passed.
Speaker 2 (08:46):
All right, I have a question, and you could just
be totally honest, you know, I'll give it to one
of the criticisms of Biden era industrial policy that is
frequently made from our abundance brothers and sisters, is that yes,
there were all of these efforts, but you know, you
couldn't get the money unless you had a certain amount
of workforce diversity, and you had to do a land
(09:08):
acknowledgment on where you were going to build the factory,
and also you had to have like childcare, etc. And
it's like, well, do you want to build the chip
plant or not? Because if you do, then why did
you put all of these other burdens that have nothing
to do with building chips per se onto the money?
In your experience, what is the role of these other
elements in the speed of grant programs or project development
(09:33):
in the US?
Speaker 4 (09:35):
I know this is a topic that gets Frankly, I
think it gets way too much air time. And I'll
tell you why. First, there were statutory requirements that came
from Congress on what the proposals had to be. Right.
So Congress themselves came and said, hey, if you're making
a project proposal, you need to have opportunity and inclusion
language or what your commitments are to community investments. If
(09:58):
you look at the DFAs that we write, the direct
funding agreements, the terms that we had around what you
might call everything. Bagel policy basically codified the commitments the
firms themselves had made to the communities that they were
investing in. It essentially said, hey, you told the community
that you were going to be investing in, you know,
the schools or water reclamation projects, whatever those community investment
(10:20):
funds could be. All we're doing is memorializing that commitment
that you've made. Secondly, on childcare, this is another one
that first in terms of the amount of funding that
we put towards it, I think it was a total
of about ten million dollars across the thirty nine billion, Okay,
So it was never a focus. It never became in
(10:40):
any of the negotiations that I set in a discussion
where the company came back and said, hey, we really
want to build this plant, but the million dollars that
you're giving us for childcare and the requirements that you
have simply aren't enough. Many of these firms are investing
in child care facilities for their workers anyways, and you
see it like there's Wall Street Journal report a few
months ago about a company that wanted to expand and
with new workers that were mostly coming from like Hispanic background,
(11:03):
and they found that the biggest thing they could do
to help bring them on was have childcare on site,
because their workers were like, I can't come to the
office because I don't have a place to leave my kids.
So it's just it's actually what the private sector is
doing anyway, And oftentimes the funding that we brought to
those initiatives actually helped them think outside the box and
think across firms to come up with regional solutions that
(11:24):
scaled better than they would on a firm by firm basis.
I will say, however, where I think critics of sort
of the everything bagel approach do have a point is
whereas a lot of the terms that I just described
were not deal stoppers. They didn't slow down negotiations, they
weren't the points of contention where there are points of
contention between different stakeholders, I think you need top leadership
(11:46):
to be able to come and say our number one
goal is to get the factory built, and various stakeholders
have to get in line. And where I'm talking about
stakeholders is where I think the abundance folks also speak
to them, groups like labor and environment, right, you have
to come and say, hey, do we want this project
to happen? There will inevitably be trade offs. There is
no world in which you can build a massive factory
(12:08):
and have zero environmental impact. Right. You have to also
even in the context of labor, we have to understand
that this is a globally competitive industry, and so the
demands that labor is making have to be viewed from
the context of like what does it take for the
factories in the US to be globally competitive? And I
think you need top leadership to come and say we're
(12:30):
not going to allow concerns that are being raised by
the community to sort of halt negotiation. So there is
a balance to be struck in terms of what's our
number one goal. Is it to get the factory done
or is it to make sure that no one's upset
at the fact that the factory is getting done.
Speaker 3 (13:03):
Give us a sense of the actual timeline for the
application process, like how quickly could you actually approve things
on average? And then I'm curious, like what was the
longest negotiation that you had and what were the sticking
points there?
Speaker 4 (13:19):
Okay, so the process the way it worked, you first
had to submit a what's called the statement of interest,
and this was honestly like a one to two paragraph
submission via Salesforce portal that basically said, we are from
company why, and we want to build a manufacturing plant
for semiconductors in Excity. It did not require a lot
of details that basically, you know, it puts you on
(13:42):
the map of our office to say, hey, we should
go and talk to these people and understand what they're
really trying to build. Then we had what we called
a pre app process, and we can come back to
that in just a moment my thoughts on the process,
but it essentially said, hey, submit a simplified version of
your final application and we'll give you some preliminary a
feedback kind of like a draft application, and will help
(14:03):
identify where we think on our scoring rubric you need
to make adjustments in order to score better. By the way,
our response to the pre app was non binding, so
if we basically said hey we don't like your pre app,
you could still apply and submit a full application. But
you know, we did take into consideration whether or not
you responded to the feedback from the pre app. The
full application was sort of your final submission. We started
(14:25):
to receive for our first full applications in the late
summer early fall of twenty twenty three, and so you
saw we got to a first preliminary announcement by the
end of twenty twenty three with BAE. So it took us,
you know, on the order of about a little more
than a quarter to get through a first full announcement.
The exact longest negotiations that it took, I have to
(14:49):
think back for a moment, but we had one final
step after the preliminary announcement following sort of exactly how
you do it in the private equity world, you know,
have a preliminary announcement saying, hey, we intend to make
this investment, we intend to go forward with this, but
it's subject to due diligence and i'd be the direct
funding agreement. Those negotiations did drag on through twenty twenty four,
and I think a lot of it came down to
(15:10):
sort of dotting the eyes and crossing the t's on
what did it mean for the government and semiconductor firms
to make a commitment to each other on these facilities. Right,
There was a lot of not on the sort of
everything bagel terms, but there was a lot of negotiation
and what does it mean if your company is sold?
What does it mean if you violate guardrails statutory requirements? Right?
(15:32):
We really had to work through that because we'd never
worked through it as a country before with firms at
this scale. But what you saw routinely was as we
reached a milestone, So as we reached the first preliminary
memorandum of terms and we reached the first direct funding agreement,
the second, third, fourth agreements would happen much faster because
we at that point had worked out a template and
could say, hey, here's how other firms are thinking about
(15:53):
doing it. There's already comfort with this format. Let's try
and you work off that, and you saw them happen
in rapid succession.
Speaker 2 (16:01):
I want to go back to what you said we're
talking about earlier, that the abundance people do have some
sort of point when it comes to environmental and labor stakeholders.
What did you see specifically? Now you don't have to
like identify the names of the projects, but look, these
are different parts of the Democratic Party constituency. Late, I'll
(16:23):
say this, the Democratic Party really wants to be liked
by organized labor. I don't know if the organized labor,
especially in the private sector, is a big Democratic constituents anymore.
But Democratic Party certainly wants to be liked by organized labor.
They certainly want people who concern about the environment talk
to us about the reality of how these different impulses
can collide with each other.
Speaker 4 (16:44):
So I think we have to take one step back
and be honest about where we stand in terms of
our manufacturing competitiveness. Right. I think they're a broad understanding
that we are no longer at the frontier in a
range of industries, and so what is it going to
take for us to catch up to the frontier and
be globally competitive again? We have cost disadvantages to operating
(17:07):
in this country, it takes longer to build. We do have,
you know, existing regulatory frameworks that can complicate some of
these projects, right. So, I think one of the consequences
of this tension of there's an urgency to move fast,
an urgency to catch up to our geopolitical competitors, but
(17:27):
not really a readiness to sort of tear down the
frameworks that we had. And I think for good reason,
you have to come back and say, well, what is
it going to take for us to catch up and
so on. A lot of these projects, you saw environmental
groups raising concerns on you know, pollution impacts. You saw
labor groups sort of saying, hey, unions are being left
out in the cold. And I would come back and say,
I think a lot of that really was noise because
(17:48):
there was like an open negotiation going on sometimes through
the media where these various groups were trying to say, hey,
make sure you don't forget about us. But I do
also think for policy, you have to be able to
come out and say what is the most important thing.
Is it for the factory to get done on time,
or is it that we leverage union labor or is
(18:12):
it that we make no impact to the environment. And
there will be times in every complex project in the
public or private sector, you have to make trade offs
between different objective functions, and I think for what we
saw was there was like an unwillingness sometimes to really
say to stakeholders, hey, we hear your needs, but they're
(18:34):
gonna be second priority in order to get the project
done right. And that complicates the discussion on how are
we going to get these things done quickly? And I
think there was a tension between the urgency that firms
and folks within the Chips Program Office felt, and outside
stakeholders who really were saying, well, don't forget about us.
Speaker 3 (18:55):
So you mentioned a bunch of competitive disadvantages that the
US has, you know, things like we're starting from a
lower base at least in terms of manufacturing, higher labor costs,
more rules and regulations, whether it's about the environment or
something else. Do we have any competitive advantages? I'm actually
struggling here, but there must be something.
Speaker 4 (19:18):
You know. Okay, so I think maybe not? No, I
do we do? Right? We have? If you think about it,
the world's most advanced firms were all designing the best
chips in the world. They're all based in the US.
We have the best university system, so we have a
deep talent pipeline. We have a tech stack than in
the United States, I think is unparalleled anywhere else. But
when it comes to being able to build a factory,
(19:41):
you know, I like to use the analogy of we
basically stopped going to the gym. Do you know before
the TSMC fab came online in late twenty twenty four,
when the last leading edge fab in the United States
was built, came online, No it's good. What is it?
Speaker 2 (19:54):
What's the answer?
Speaker 4 (19:55):
Twenty thirteen. So for basically a decade, we stopped building large,
leading edge fabs in the United States, and so the
muscle for how to build those factories atrophied. And that
doesn't just mean construction workers, like obviously all those people
went and probably found jobs elsewhere, but it also means
for the regulatory apparatus for what does it mean to
(20:15):
understand the environmental impacts of these facilities? And so when
you talk about the delays in construction, oftentimes those delays
are from the permitting processes that are handled at the
state and local level. Well, in a lot of the
places that we're building these facilities, state and local regulators
hadn't seen a facility like this before because we hadn't
been building them in over a decade, and so they
didn't know what the impacts were, and you know, it
(20:38):
required an education process. And I think a lot of
the noise that we heard in the last two years
was because we were kind of starting this again after
not going to the gym for over a decade. And
you know what happens when you don't go to the gym,
you go back one time you're really really sore the
next day, but if you keep going, your body kind
of gets used to it. And that's why, for example,
(20:58):
take TSMC's FABS in Arizona, you don't hear the same
noise about labor unions or permitting concerns over Fab two
because the entire system sort of got into shape, right.
And I think if the chips program off is going
to be looked at as a success, it's going to
be because the second, third, fourth, fifth facilities that are
(21:19):
being built at these sites are showing rates of learning
in how long it takes for them to get brought online,
brought up to speed, brought up to a similar capacity
to what they have and their overseas benchmarks. So I
would look at it's like the first fabs are like
a proof of concept, can we do this? And it's
really in the second, third, fourth fabs at these local
(21:39):
projects that you'll start to see the ecosystems of the church.
Speaker 2 (21:57):
I asked earlier about whether environmentalists in unions are restraint.
Something else that I'm very interested in is you mentioned,
you know, the top semiconductor companies in the world are
actually in the United States. We just don't really make them,
but we design them, and that's actually much more valuable.
And in Nvidia is a much more valuable company than TSMC,
(22:18):
the legendary TSMC. And so, you know, I've been writing
about for a while like how much of this is
an issue of capitalism? And investors in semiconductor companies don't
want US manufacturing because that's lower margins. You move that overseas,
et cetera. You don't want design and fabrication in house
(22:38):
together because then you mix a high margin company with
a low margin company, et cetera. Obviously, to some extent,
the idea of using public money is to solve this problem.
But just when you're look in general at the questions
of US manufacturing and high tech areas or whatever, how
much is it about capitalist incentives.
Speaker 4 (22:55):
I do think there is a tension here. I know
you've covered this as well. You saw TI, which is
engaging in one of the most aggressive expansions in the
United States, hoping to build seven fabs by the middle
of next decade. Overall, had activist investors basically pressuring them
to reduce their capital investments. And there is a tension
where shareholders are going to say, hey, you could return
(23:17):
money to me that would have better and I could
go use it in other use cases. Yeah, I mean famously,
look at the case of Intel, which for a long
time was returning a lot of cash to shareholders through
dividends and stock buybacks and fell behind the leading edge curve.
So that tension is absolutely real. But I do think
firms and investors understand the value of having these facilities.
(23:39):
I think the challenges creating a structure where the government
can help equalize the returns so that the private value
is similar to the public value. Let me put it
in another way, the government highly values these manufacturing facilities being
in the United States for the economic and national security
reasons I laid out above, right, But private shareholders don't
(24:01):
value them as much. But there are levers that we
can pull to help make them look more attractive. And
I think the biggest under discuss lever was the Investment
tax credit. Right. The investment tax credit is a twenty
five percent tax credit for firms that invest in manufacturing
in the United States. I think there's a world where
the future of industrial policy I'm putting quotes around that
(24:23):
really comes and says, hey, the focus should be on
tax credits that give firms certainty on what their cost
structure and return structure is going to look like for
capital investments made in the United States, and maybe the
disbursement funding that's subject to review by bureaucrats is a
smaller pot that is really geared towards firms that have
(24:45):
capital shortcomings or capital concerns. Right, So, I think you
could plausibly make the claim that the intels and tsmcs
of the world don't necessarily need cash from the government
because what they're optimizing for is like an NPV function
on their capital investments, and tax credits can solve all
of that, in fact, can happen with less government intervention.
(25:06):
But there are smaller firms who really do need cash
infusions in order to bring, you know, to bridge the
value of death that we've been talking about for decades
in this country but never really had an approach to SAULT.
And I think there's a slim down version of industrial
policy in the future that really focuses on ay tax
credits can equalize our cost structure and make investments attractive
where you know, we take target smaller amounts of funding
(25:29):
to critical technologies that we want to make sure happen
in the United States.
Speaker 3 (25:33):
So on this note, I mean one of the discussions
that inevitably pops up when you're doing this type of
policy is public versus private and the sort of crowding
in or crowding out effect on private capital. I imagine
that part of the intent of the Chips Act was
to encourage private investors to get excited about not only
(25:56):
you know, the importance of manufacturing here in the US,
but also the potential returns. To your point about the
tax credit, did you see a change in behavior on
the part of private investors. Did you ever talk to
them about, you know, what their concerns were or what
they wanted to see from this program. And were you successful,
(26:16):
I guess in making chips manufacturing cool again.
Speaker 4 (26:20):
I think we were. I think the Investment Office, led
by Todd Fisher, did a lot of outreach to the
investment community broadly to help them understand not just our approach,
but how we were working with firms to make these
investments more attractive in the United States. And you know,
I think there's a broad recognition that being able to
(26:40):
build industrial capacity in the US has benefits beyond just
the balance sheet. That being said, I do think it's
an ongoing discussion with the investment community on how do
we build certainty in these you know, government programs. Right. So,
the the biggest thing that the Chips Program Office did
(27:02):
was it gave firms confidence in what their returns would
look like if they invested in the US because they
had a tax credit and award dollars that would come
to them, and they could go to their investors and say, hey, look,
there is a cost disadvantage, but we feel confident that
we'll be able to reduce it with the public dollars
that are coming in. And I really think the biggest
(27:23):
lever that the government can pull is giving firms certainty
when they're making twenty to hundred billion dollar investments, because
they don't want to be caught on the wrong side
by a policy change that now gets them underwater on
a facility that's half done, And the sunk costs of
building a facility and half getting it half equipped are
(27:43):
really large, and so I think that is the challenge
for a lot of these firms and for investors. They
want to be able to say, hey, is what we're
modeling really going to hold in the long term from
a cost structure basis for us to feel comfortable in
what the returns are going to be.
Speaker 2 (27:59):
I just have one last question myself, is what was accomplished?
We don't know what the future is or maybe you
can give some insight into what is going on at
CHIPS today in April twenty twenty five. But you said
at the beginning about like what was accomplished during CHIPS
And I'm aware the projects have been started and some
have been completed, et cetera. But what did we get
(28:19):
from all of these efforts and should we be happy
with it?
Speaker 4 (28:23):
So if the top line number that you know, we
used while the Biden administration was still around was four
hundred and fifty billion dollars in announced investment, and you
started to see this with the data from the Census
showed that we were making more investments in electronics facilities
construction spend in twenty twenty three and twenty twenty four
than we had in the last two decades combined.
Speaker 2 (28:45):
What about like actual like production? What I care about
is actual things to go into computers, cars.
Speaker 4 (28:51):
And one hundred percent. So we got to recognize too,
right that these are not going to happen overnight. These
facilities aren't going to over The bill was passed in
August of twenty twenty two, right, so within a couple
of years you had you know, four hundred, like I said,
four and fifty billion dollars if investments announced. And I
think the biggest thing is that firms have to feel
comfortable moving forward with those plans. So let's take TSMC
(29:14):
as an example. TSMC, by the end of the Biden
administration has started pumping chips out for Apple and AMD
out of its facility in Arizona. And as it continues
to move forward with the second and third facilities, that
ecosystem is going to mature to the point where the
cost differentials versus Taiwan are going to be reduced. The
scale is going to bring more suppliers on shore, so
(29:35):
they're going to have more of their coems and their
gases and their you know, consumable materials sourced from the
United States. And as that happens, you start to you know,
build out a broader ecosystem because you know, we heard
all the time from suppliers who were saying, Hey, we're
building a facility in the United States to service all
the fabs that are coming online. Because we can now
(29:56):
justify the investment based off of the number of downstream
investments that have been made. And as they build out
their facilities, then their suppliers are going to come here.
So I think there's going to be an ecosystem maturation
that's going to continue, hopefully through the rest of the decade.
That's going to bring not just you know, front end
fabrication facilities, but their suppliers facilities and then their suppliers
(30:18):
suppliers facilities, And now you talk about getting the sort
of industrial ecosystems that really had atrophy in the United States.
And when you start to go you know, N plus
two in terms of the supplier level, you're no longer
just serving the semiconductor industry. You're building fabricated machine parts
that go into semiconductor manufacturing equipment and also going to
say airplanes or automobiles, and you now you know, buttress
(30:41):
the entire industrial ecosystem, even though you're starting from just
building semiconductor manufacturing plants. Right. So I think that is
what the long term is going to look like. But
we have to you know, in this where I have
to come back to the point on we have to
also be honest about where we were right. We weren't
building these fabs. There's a reason it took so long,
(31:01):
and it's not going to happen overnight. And if we're
not willing to maintain the investments and the programs that
we have, I think a lot of firms are going
to say, Hey, the uncertainty isn't worth it for me
to continue to invest. Because I can't go to my
shareholders and say this investment has a solid return. They're
going to look at it and they're gonna discount it
(31:22):
with all that uncertainty and pressure me to not make
these investments, or to reduce the investments I make and
focus on places where the returns are much more solid.
I think that's the situation that we absolutely should avoid.
And you even hear that from the Trump administration, where,
for example, Jade Vance at a speech at the American
Dynamism Conference talked about making adjustments to tax credits for
(31:42):
firms in terms of bonus appreciation and the R and
D tax credit, those are very much in line with
making these investments less risky for firms the United States.
So if the Trump administration continues down that vein, I
think you'll see firms feel confident that they can expand
these investments and build out these ecosystems to a a
size and scale that's globally competitive. Right. And then you
(32:04):
tap into the broader tech stack that we have here,
where now the smartest engineers from Nvidia, Apple, and am
D don't have to fly to Taiwan. They can fly
to Arizona to make sure that they're getting their designs
taped out correctly, and they're working with universities all across
the United States on future designs and technologies. And then
you get an industrial ecosystem that really leverages our capabilities. Right.
(32:27):
One last point on this one. I think a lot
of people made this criticism when the Chips Act was
passed that the United States should have just continued to
invest in R and D and that's what we should leverage.
We should leverage our R and D capabilities. But here's
another trivia question for the two of you. When was
the quiz?
Speaker 2 (32:46):
Right now? So actually we're going to use these and
just we're putting on a trivia event. So we're going
to use your questions and turn them into questions.
Speaker 4 (32:52):
All right, keep going, I'll send you some When was
the first EUV machine installed in the United States. It
was two thousand and six at Sunny Albany, which is
the nanotech complex in upstate New York. We didn't have
high volume manufacturing with an EUV machine until December of
(33:12):
twenty twenty four out of TSMC eighteen years, right, So
I think the critics who said we should double down
on R and D actually failed to grapple with the
fact that the R and D first approach was empirically failing. US.
We invented EUV technology through our DD National Labs and
(33:33):
in partnership with ASML, we installed the first alpha tools
in both Europe and the United States. And then, I
mean the United States was a half decade behind East
Asia in bringing EUV manufacturing to scale, right, so that
formula wasn't working. And one of the shortages that TSMC
talked about was that they didn't have enough workers who
(33:54):
knew how to install and bring up EUV machines. So
you can see how this sort of scades the ecosystem atrophies.
And then when firms come and try to do foreign
direct investment, they come and say, well, you don't have
the skills that we need, even though we can point
to all the R and D investments, and I think
the problem was we were sort of making these R
and D investments in a vacuum and kind of hoping
that they'd get sucked into an industrial ecosystem that, you know,
(34:18):
despite what a lot of economists say about America still
having a very high value add for manufacturing, you look
on the ground and there are tons of anecdotes that
the manufacturing ecosystem has atrophied and we have to make
investments in order to bring it back up to be
globally competitive. And I think an anecdote exactly like the
delay in bringing EUV manufacturing to scale in the US,
(34:38):
exemplifies why the old approach wasn't working. And we can
debate like what the right ways are and how industrial
policy should be structured, and what tax credits, etc. Need
to be done, and trade reforms need to be done,
but I don't think you can debate whether or not
the old you know, let's call it pre twenty twenty
approach was actually maintaining America's industrial competitiveness, because it wasn't.
Speaker 3 (35:03):
I have just one more question, and that is what's
next for the Chips Program Office itself? Because I mean,
under the Trump administration, fiscal spending doesn't really seem to
be very popular, to put it mildly, and there's obviously
a bon fight over who gets to control the pocketbook
of America, whether it's Congress or the president. At the
(35:24):
same time, we have DOGE, which is implementing sweeping changes
on the government itself, you know, entire agencies going away
and stuff like that. And then finally, the other thing
happening which we should definitely ask about, is tariffs. Right,
and maybe tariffs end up being good for domestic manufacturing
like semiconductors, but I can imagine that there are also
(35:48):
still either components or materials that chips manufacturing actually needs
to import. So I guess my question is, how are
you weighing all these different things that are going on
right now?
Speaker 4 (36:00):
Now?
Speaker 3 (36:00):
What do they mean for the actual Chips Act and
for manufacturing.
Speaker 4 (36:04):
So let me give you one one small anecdote to
show you how firms are trying to understand what's happening. Right,
I was talking to a supplier that wants to build
a facility outside of Arizona. Right, they're exemplifying that ecosystem
development that I talked about that's coming out of TSMC's investment.
And I was on a call with them in late
March and they basically said, we don't understand what's happening.
(36:27):
We don't know what our cost structure is going to
look like, and you know, our project is undergoing change
constantly because our cost structure is undergoing change. So, you know,
for a lot of these firms, before they're willing to
make bets that you know, in some of these smaller
firms can be like, you know, life or death size
bets for the firm, they really want to have an
(36:49):
understanding of what the policy framework is going to look like.
And I think we have to sort of get through
the period of you know, a new headline rocking markets
every day or it to shake out to understand how
it'll affect the long term decisions a lot for a
lot of these firms. You know, the sense I got
from talking to that firm and from other firms was
that they're going to kind of wait it out and
see They're going to try and buy as much time
(37:10):
as they can to see where things reach a steady
state before reevaluating their investment plans. I think on the
flip side, However, there is a bipartisan agreement on the
need to bring industrial manufacturing back to the United States, right,
So I think the question is going to be on
the methods by which we do it. So you know,
I go back and you say, is it through tax incentives,
(37:32):
is it through trade policy? Is it through industrial policy?
I think all of those tools interact with each other. Obviously,
different administrations have different approaches, so I don't know where
we'll end up with that. The last thing I'll say
is the methods that we developed in the Chips Program
Office for trying to get firms comfortable with making investments
in the United States and working to accelerate their investments
(37:54):
by working with stakeholders across you know, environment, workforce, and
other policy objectives. I think that is actually going to continue.
If you look at the Investment Accelerator Executive Order that
was announced by President Trump a few weeks back, the
sorts of activities that he's saying, the White Glove Service,
I think that was pioneered in the Chips Program Office,
where we worked with firms to get through the labor issues,
(38:17):
to get through the environmental issues, and permitting questions to
make sure that these projects could move forward. It's why
I've said repeatedly that there were no Chips Act construction
projects that were held up by Neeper review. And I
think they're going to take that recipe that was developed
and try to scale it across multiple sectors. You know,
certainly going to be different contextual challenges. But if they
do that, I think it's going to be a vote
(38:39):
in favor of the work that we were doing at
the policy level to make sure in manufacturing investments in
the United States are viable for firms, and that's going
to have to be complemented with a you know, approach
to make them financially viable. I don't know, and I
don't know that any of us can say what the
Trump administration is going to finalize its policy mix on.
And I think firms are going to wait to see
(38:59):
what that policy mix looks like from the Trump administration
before you know, placing further large bets. So if there's
a lot of policy uncertainty, you may see some companies
come out and say, hey, we're gonna do price increases
and we're gonna maybe pause equipment purchases until we really
know what the fiscal impact of tariffs or other. You know,
new trade negotiations are going to be for our project.
Speaker 2 (39:21):
Huss and con. Thank you so much for coming back
on odd Lage, and I'm sharing with us lessons that
you learned during your stint in the public sector. Thank
you for your service. I learned a lot, so appreciate
you coming back on.
Speaker 4 (39:33):
Joe Tracy. Always a pleasure. And the last thing I'll
say is, I think the CHIP was an experiment in
what industrial policy could look like. The scoreboard, the early
returns look good, but I think the real measure of
whether it was successful we'll know by the end of
the Trump administration if these other projects come on.
Speaker 2 (39:53):
Fine, all right, well have you.
Speaker 4 (40:08):
Tracy? That was really good.
Speaker 2 (40:10):
It's cool that one of our past guests like started
this whole other career between the last time we talked
to them, Yeah, which is like in maybe early twenty
twenty one, then went and got this job. And then
we've been doing this a long time and someone had
like a whole chunk of their career that they could
fill us in on between times that we talked to them.
Speaker 3 (40:26):
Yeah, that's kind of crazy. So we feel old. Yes,
On the plus side, we get an inside look at
the Chips Program Office, which is pretty cool. I do
take a Hassan's point about I guess like building up
the muscle of manufacturing and his point that, well, we
had been doing it a certain way, which is basically
all through private capital for many many years, and it
(40:49):
hasn't resulted in the purpose that we now want, which
is actually building factories to produce these things. And so
you really need some sort of catalysts to get stuff going,
to get people excited about it. Yeah, maybe change the
calculation in terms of profit margins and the result is
the Chips Act.
Speaker 2 (41:08):
I'm so depressed about the twenty tens and like, seriously,
just like the way we let everything hollow out, you know,
we talk about it with housing and sawmills and all
of this stuff that we just like didn't do when
we could have, and then the costs that imposes on
us or we haven't like build a fab in forever
and we forgot. I do think it's interesting like this
question of you know, even with TSMC's second fab or
(41:30):
you know, you don't see any of those same headlines
that you saw with the first one. That is encouraging.
Maybe you have a sort of template to quickly navigate
the state and local issues. Some of the questions around
you know, the quote stakeholders, et cetera. Which every system
has stakeholders. If this isn't not unique in that, I mean, obviously,
you know, every system has to have a way. I
(41:52):
think what's important, you know some of the I remember
we did a conversation about nuclear construction in China, and
it's like they have their own you know, it's not
like there aren't environmentalists in China, et cetera. What they
have is like a system for allocating like who wins
and what the priorities are, et cetera.
Speaker 3 (42:07):
And top down leadership.
Speaker 2 (42:09):
Yeah, there are many. Yeah, a much more sort of
straightforward system in that respect. But uh no, I thought
that was interesting, and you know, I'm hopeful that Husson
wasn't totally dooming.
Speaker 3 (42:19):
You know what they say about factories, Joe, No, the
best time to build a factory was twenty years ago. Yeah,
the second best time to build a factory is today.
Speaker 2 (42:28):
All right, Well, you know, I wonder, I wonder we're
recording this April eighth. I wonder if there's a single
new factory green broken ground today right now. I kind
of doubt it.
Speaker 3 (42:36):
Yeah, all right, shall we leave it there?
Speaker 2 (42:38):
Let's leave it there.
Speaker 3 (42:39):
This has been another episode of the odd Lots podcast.
I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway.
Speaker 2 (42:45):
And I'm Joe Wisenthal. You can follow me at the
Stalwart Fellow Husson Khan. He's at Husson Khan. Follow our
producers Carman, Rodriguez at Carmen Erman, Dash Ol Bennett at
dashbod and kel Brooks at cal Brooks. More Odd Laws content,
go to Bloomberg dot com odd Lots. We have all
of our episodes in the daily newsletter, and you can
chat about all of these topics, including semiconductors twenty four
(43:07):
to seven in our discord discord dot gg slash Oddlins.
Speaker 3 (43:11):
And if you enjoy when we talk about industrial policy
and remind everyone that the Chips Act actually exists, then
please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform.
And remember, if you are a Bloomberg subscriber, you can
listen to all of our episodes absolutely ad free. All
you need to do is find the Bloomberg channel on
Apple Podcasts and follow the instructions there. Thanks for listening,
Hosts And Creators
Joe Weisenthal
Tracy Alloway
Popular Podcasts
40s and Free Agents: NFL Draft Season
Daniel Jeremiah of Move the Sticks and Gregg Rosenthal of NFL Daily join forces to break down every team's needs this offseason.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
The Bobby Bones Show
Listen to 'The Bobby Bones Show' by downloading the daily full replay.