US election and tech, and a bit about chips
The day after the US election sees me searching the web for what it means for tech.
I went looking on Wired (where I got waylaid by an interview with Melissa Meyer, ex-Yahoo CEO), Techcrunch (not a big fan of that hovering menu bar), Ars Technica (thumbs up to the new website design). Yup – strayed onto a meandering path, but I also came across a couple of great pieces that provided the summation I was after.
Chris Keall over at the NZ Herald provides a mix of global and local context. The latter is why you need to pay for NZ news because no one else in the world gives one iota about us. I’m just going to respect that paywall and provide a quick para on the article, and you can get more at the source here.
Chris notes the election is a negative for Infratil (its datacentre business) and RocketLab (what it says on the tin), but his analysis suggests both will probably end up OK. It’s a win for Palantir (data analysis), so a good result for one Kiwi (Peter Thiel), but maybe a loss for home-grown SaaS companies nervous about Donald Trump’s threatened 10% tariff on all imports from countries other than China (that country is in line for 60%).
The bit about chips
Mention of China brings me to the second great piece, or rather email because that’s how I get it as a subscriber to Stratechery. Writer Ben Thompson gives a solid recap and, being based in Taiwan, he is especially good at analysing what it might mean for TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company), which makes silicon chips – the raw material for everything in tech.
TSMC’s history (government-backed), its laser focus (it’s on the chips – let Nvidia and Apple et al deal with the smarts), and its geographical location (right next to China, a country that doesn’t recognise Taiwan’s sovereignty and may or may not want to invade it), makes it massively important to all of us. Recognising this, the US government (starting with Trump) has been luring TSMC to its shores and the company is now establishing a foundry (where they make chips, fiendishly hard to do apparently) in Arizona.
Ben sets up a high-level view of the consequences of the Trump victory, and it’s a mixed bag. On the one hand TSMC has started production in Arizona, on the other Trump has accused it of stealing from the US chip industry. Whether in the latter Trump is just playing to his base – his usual rhetoric that non-US companies that do better than US companies are bad – is hard to tell.
Now, you might wonder what’s up with Intel, the semiconductor manufacturer founded in Silicon Valley in the 1960s. Ben covers them too, in other pieces and even in a video, and from what I can tell the main problem with Intel is that it tried to move up the value chain. It wanted to be TSMC and Nvidia and Apple (at one time it was touting smart glasses). And that has not worked.
What is Intel to do? Maybe structurally separate?
Which puts me in mind of the structural separation of Telecom (now Chorus and Spark) and why that enabled the nationwide fibre rollout that we all benefit from… but that’s maybe for tomorrow*. Time now for a cup of tea, and a lie down.
*This post can now be found here.
