US Govt's sluggish Chips Act payouts slam the brakes on Samsung's fab, delayed to 2025

Samsung fab is different from Samsung's Exynos team

TSMC has also not received a cent. Their chairman got kicked a few weeks ago for being stupid enough to trust American promises of money.

A fab can fabricate designs by others.

Samsung should be able to cover the tab in the interim if they really wanted to build here

That's the whole point. Samsung and TSMC never wanted to build American plants due to their history of stealing IPs, but the US government strong-armed them into building them. The subsidies were meant to smooth things over but now it's not being doled out.

This is just like Walgreens and RiteAid claiming they have to close stores due to theft, only to later admit that was a complete fabrication.

Thought this was interesting, so I tried looking for more information. Didn't find anything other than people speculating. If you have a link or search terms I could use to find of an article of these or similar companies saying the closings were actually because of something else, I'd appreciate it.

It's less executive action and more pipeline issues.

The department related to approval for these things just hired 140 new employees that just got through on-boarding for this specific task. That 140 is literally the max Congress approved for handling applications in all tiers of the program, with a lot of Senators having hoped that somewhere around ½ that number would have been the final tally hired in.

Those new employees will then need to navigate the 50+ page applications for each bid. With something around 480 bids in the first CHIPs acceptance round. So around 180 people will need to digest as quickly as possible somewhere around 24,000+ pages of applications. That's not counting any kind of objections that might have been filed by State, private citizen, and also competitors (Samsung and Intel have a few of these already on some of the first tier 1s already).

And all of this is just the first steps of the program that was written out by Congress. Congressional oversight, because remember all executive agencies established by law have Congressional oversight, has been really clear as mud on some of the finer details of this program. Biggest back and forth is the offshore but American funding, which holy crap I can't write enough about how complicated that debate has become.

All of this is happening on the several step process that Congress prescribed for this whole thing. Because, tier 3 and tier 2 funding are good candidates for abuse of funding. Solyndra echos can almost be heard when mentioning this. Or more recent example of what could go wrong when you just open the flood gates, PPP loans.

Thing is, companies complain money isn't coming fast enough all the time. The money could be on it's way next week and they'd still complain that it wasn't there on Monday. The more important thing is that the money isn't being wasted too badly and that's only happening with careful consideration. This is literally the exact same thing I said about Trump's wall. One, I don't think it would work anyway. Two, it's ignoring a lot of commitments we have internationally. But three, if we're going to do it, at least have a plan for properly spending the money which Trump did not because it basically took military funding and diverted it toward the wall, and thus it fell into one of those "you either spend it or lose it" and it meant that the construction had to be rushed and why a lot of "Trump's wall" is mostly falling into the Rio Grande or made of metal slats that can easily be sawed through with a hand saw.

So sure, whatever, but the more important thing.... Well let me clarify, the more important thing from my perspective, so totally cool if someone disagrees, is that the money is carefully spent wisely. It doesn't have to be a homerun, I just would rather the money not be tossed all over the place like PPP was.

And I get some of the arguments for why PPP was done the way it was, but to put it to scale, I would prefer handing it out like a 3, I understand why people would want it handed out like a 7, but holy fuck we handed it out like a 9.3. Where 1 is being penny up the ass to make copper wire tight about the money and 10 is prolapsed colon flow of money out the ass. It was really indefensible how just loosey goosey we were with that money. And yes, there's been other times we've done that (cough military cough), I didn't like those either.

Doubtful that Huawei's 5nm chip is domestically-produced. Looks like old stock TSMC that Huawei no longer needs to stockpile because domestic capability is quickly becoming competitive with it.