Tweeting is not going to make TSMC. Neither will ribbon cuttings, press releases, or buying 9.9% of Intel with taxpayer money. Semiconductor leadership isn't built on headlines or hashtags. It's built on thirty years of quiet, relentless execution — the kind of long-term discipline that the United States, in its current political condition, seems fundamentally incapable of sustaining.
The Time Horizon Problem
Taiwan built TSMC through decades of continuity. Every administration, blue or green, backed the same industrial strategy: stable funding, consistent incentives, and patient capital. South Korea did the same with Samsung and Hynix. Neither country confused industrial planning with a news cycle.
The United States, by contrast, tries to build fabs on a two-year political clock.
Biden: pushed a structured, strategic CHIPS Act rollout, aimed at coordinated domestic capacity and workforce pipelines.
Trump: threw the plan out the window, converting targeted grants into an $8.9 billion equity stake in Intel — a company that hasn't executed cleanly in over a decade — with no governance rights, no board influence, and no performance triggers.
Next administration: whoever it is will almost certainly scrap this version, rebrand the program, and start another round of half-baked initiatives.
Industrial strategy requires boring repetition. America offers chaos and performative politics.
The Intel Mirage
Intel wants to be TSMC and Apple at the same time. It's failing at both. Subsidizing Intel without structural reform is industrial cosplay with taxpayer money.
Tariffs won't solve this either. You can't tax your way to 3-nanometer capabilities. Samsung and TSMC didn't become world leaders because Korean and Taiwanese chips were cheaper — they became leaders because they executed better, year after year, for decades. Slapping tariffs on overseas semiconductors while failing to build domestic capacity? It's just a tax. It will not bring that manufacturing back here.
What TSMC Actually Did
It's worth reminding ourselves how TSMC became TSMC:
Decades of boring, methodical iteration — node after node, each one delivered on time, with predictable yields.
Government alignment that never wavered across multiple administrations.
A business model built on trust: pure-play foundry services with no internal products to compete against customers like Apple, NVIDIA, or AMD.
Discipline so tight that every dollar of CapEx went to pre-committed, high-volume customers.
Deep engineering talent pipelines — Taiwan invested heavily in semiconductor education and research infrastructure, creating the skilled workforce that makes advanced manufacturing possible.
None of this is happening in the United States. What we have instead is a photo op, a press release, and a pile of taxpayer money sitting in Intel's corporate treasury, waiting to be burned by another round of missed roadmaps.
The Cost of Political Whiplash
Semiconductors are a long game. Each new node takes five to seven years of planning, R&D, and ramping. In the U.S., the plan changes every time a new president takes office.
The result?
Fabs announced but delayed or canceled mid-build.
Partners like TSMC and Samsung hedging bets on U.S. capacity because they don't trust the funding pipeline.
Engineers unwilling to relocate or commit careers to programs that may be gutted after the next election.
Even China — with all its inefficiencies — maintains strategic continuity. SMIC is still years behind TSMC, but it isn't whiplashed by election cycles. Every five-year plan builds on the last. In Beijing, strategy survives elections. In Washington, nothing survives cable news.
The AI Counterexample
We don't have these problems with AI. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta don't wait for Congressional approval to train models or build data centers. They don't need ribbon cuttings or taxpayer equity investments. Industry does the work and ignores political squabbling — which is exactly why America leads in AI while falling behind in chips. The same government that can't buy a wafer on time didn't have to spend a dime to lead the world in AI.
The difference? Politicians haven't decided that AI requires "strategic intervention." Companies just build, iterate, and compete. No industrial policy, no bipartisan commissions, no equity stakes in failing firms. Just private capital, technical talent, and market discipline.
What Needs to Happen
If we want to stop play-acting at industrial policy, we need fundamental structural changes:
A bipartisan semiconductor authority insulated from electoral politics, with a 10- to 15-year mandate. Think of it as the Federal Reserve for chips — technocratic leadership with fixed terms, transparent metrics, and immunity from partisan interference. The authority would control funding, set technical standards, and coordinate with allies, while politicians stick to what they do best: taking credit for other people's work.
Performance-based funding tied to yields, delivery schedules, and external customer adoption. No more checks written against promises. Companies get paid when they ship working chips to real customers at competitive prices.
Workforce development that matches Taiwan's commitment to engineering excellence. This means expanding university semiconductor programs, creating apprenticeship pathways, and building the technical talent base that advanced manufacturing requires.
A recognition that building fabs is not a news cycle — it's a generational project requiring the kind of patient capital and institutional stability that America used to excel at, back when we built the interstate highway system and put people on the moon.
The Bottom Line
TSMC was built on quiet focus. America is trying to build its semiconductor future on dopamine cycles, cable news, and partisan grandstanding.
Tweeting is not going to make TSMC. Neither is a ribbon-cutting in Arizona or a stock purchase in a company that hasn't shipped a competitive node in a decade. Until we break the cycle of political short-termism, we'll keep buying stock in failure — and calling it strategy.
Or we could give up on the fantasy of being self-sufficient. It's become this assumption that we need to make everything here. But if we protect Taiwan and South Korea like we protect the USA — think of it as an Asian NATO with our most capable manufacturing allies — then we don't need this domestic manufacturing theater. Taiwan and South Korea already do advanced manufacturing better than we do. Instead of pretending we can rebuild their thirty-year head start in a presidential term, we could secure reliable supply from existing leaders like TSMC and Samsung, and focus our military and diplomatic resources on protecting those supply chains.
We could also build strategic stockpiles of critical semiconductors — the same way we maintain oil reserves. Buy chips from Taiwan and South Korea while they're available, store them properly, and have months or years of buffer stock in case supply lines get disrupted. It's cheaper than building fabs, faster than industrial policy, and actually addresses the real security risk: temporary supply interruption during a crisis.
Sometimes the best industrial strategy is humility: protect the allies who can build, and stop pretending a press release is a process node.