Rui Carmo
I wasn’t going to go anywhere near this because it is too close to actual politics for my taste, but Ben Thompson’s take on the U.S. government’s 10% stake in Intel is a great read.
A heady mix of long-term manufacturing woes and geopolitics, it still manages to raise a few skeptical eyebrows as it lays out how decades of strategic missteps have left Intel trailing behind rivals like TSMC, while also highlighting how chip production isn’t something you can fix overnight.
Nor, should I add, the actual success of their products—their top consumer CPUs have been plagued with issues over the last couple of years, and, rather ironically, their most successful products (by volume) are the new low-end Alder Lake chips that have been quietly flooding the Mini-PC market, even as AMD take the most profitable niches.
There’s a dry wit to Ben’s critique—government intervention might be the “least bad” option, but it’s hardly a cure, especially when national security and commercial realities clash and government itself is going through a credibility crisis.