Why Trump’s tech dreams are quietly crumbling
Tariffs, immigration restrictions and skilled labour shortages make it hard for the US to boost production
PHILIP Wong, formerly chief scientist of the mighty Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation (TSMC), now a Stanford professor, recently looked at where his former PhD students now work.
He found that a mere 17 per cent have jobs at companies that actually make microchips (like Intel, Micron, Samsung, SK Hynix or TSMC); the rest are at entities designing or using them (such as Apple, Nvidia, AMD, Google and Pinterest) or elsewhere (like McKinsey).
“(They) all have the skills to go inside a cleanroom and make a chip from a blank piece of silicon (into) a working transistor or memory device,” he tells me. “Yet a majority have chosen to work in other industries.”
