How are they going to afford an investment thats ~1/3rd the value of the company? Seems like one of those announcements that no one follows up on to keep them honest?
cchance
They wont its another marketing scam by the admin lol, promise shit now, don't deliver reap benefits till the public/admin forgets, you dont actually have to do shit you just have to say you will same as the last time
no_wizard
Much like when the administration announced an investment of 500 Billion USD in AI some months back, not a peep since. Actually shocked nobody here has even referenced that in relation to this, at least at the time of this writing
Much like that “initiative”, I imagine this won’t materialize either, they’re largely hoping government funds get steered toward them and by which point they’ll pocket everything they can while delivering a minimum of what was promised, if anything at all, and they won’t be properly held accountable for it.
troymc
Are you referring to the Stargate Project? I guess so, since there weren't any other 500 billion USD AI projects announced recently in the USA.
Construction of the first data center Abilene, Texas site is ongoing. Emily Chang visited the site over a month ago and got video footage [1]. So it's not nothing. Will they actually invest 500 billion in the end? I dunno; I guess we'll see. The main challenges seem to be the availability of electrical power and skilled workers, not demand, investment or ambition.
The overall impression I get of such projects is that politicians celebrate the funding victory, and then forget about it. Then the project's funds get eaten up by administrative costs over time. Ezra Klien [1] recently highlighted two such examples: high speed rail in CA, and rural broadband subsidies. Personally, I haven't seen much, if anything, actually spent out of Biden's infrastructure bill. The money from these programs just seems to...vanish. Allowing this to happen undermines the idea that the USG is a trustworthy spender of our money. I would personally prefer it if political success wasn't just grabbing more budget, but actually overseeing successful execution of public projects.
>Much like when the administration announced an investment of 500 Billion USD in AI some months back
That was a project by Oracle to build some data centres, many of which had already broke ground and were under construction, and they pulled OpenAI and Softbank in to give it that AI veneer.
So it's stuff that is really happening, and was already happening. Similarly this TI plant was announced under the prior administration as a win of the chips act, and again it's being recycled to current.
This sort of shell game works for a while, but a couple of years the bill comes due.
nightski
I have no desire to defend the admin, but that was not what was announced at all. It was announced that OpenAI/Oracle/Softbank were investing $500B, which they are. It had nothing to do with government spending.
jazzypants
Trump announced it at the White House.
He wants credit for everything while doing nothing.
What's your point? The question was about gov spending, not political antics.
ahmeneeroe-v2
The $500B was their own money, not gov money...what do you think they're going to pocket?
ryukoposting
I find that the easiest way to suss out corporate political advertisements is to look for how they refer to the federal government. If they say "federal government" or "$NAME_OF_ACT" then there's usually at least an inkling of intent behind whatever they say next. If they say "$PRESIDENT administration" or "$PARTY_NAME," you can be certain you're reading a political advertisement.
chaosbolt(dead)
[flagged]
ourmandave
But if we don't defend the 51st State of Israel, we'll never get Canada and Greenland to join.
elzbardico
Not the 51st State. It is more like our Colonial Metropolis. We just need to pay tribute and keep quiet about it. Occasionally the tribute must be paid with the blood of our young, in order to allow our colonial master to most effectively genocide their neighbors
lostlogin
Was the parent post referring to Israel or Russia?
The downfall of so many large companies back then, including general Capital, basically turning into a finance arm glorified general electric
ProllyInfamous
>back then
And still.
General Electric was (just a few decades ago) the largest non-gold asset, and isn't even Top 50 anymore.
Saudi Aramco was (just a few years ago) the largest non-gold asset, and isn't even Top 10 anymore.
If you want to read about similarities in Xerox's own hubris/downfall, Dealers of Lightning is one of my favorite non-fiction reads of the past few years (about their SFbay PARC Labs of the 70s/80s... and its failures to adapt).
FinnLobsien
Just because you brought up this topic: Which of the top tech companies today do you think are most like Xerox/GE in the sense that they're maximizing financial gain out of what they've built without building for the future?
ben_w
Also not OP, and I'm not an analyst, but my impression is that each of these have stopped looking to the future:
• Meta (all of it)
• Google (not necessarily the rest of Alphabet)
• Apple — UI updates are not innovation, and there's a lot of bugs
• X (the social media website, no comment on the new parent AI company)
• The car-shaped bits of Tesla — the humanoid robotics bits are at least "future", even if Tesla is not demonstrating anything new in this space
The "Computer Associates" of today is... Salesforce.
Have they really improved Tableau, Heroku, Mulesoft, Sendgrid, Slack, now Informatica?
wil421
ServiceNow wants to become the new Oracle/IBM, same went Salesforce I think.
ProllyInfamous
There are several good examples in adjacent-comments, each company suffering from the same common deathknell of becoming largest in its field of similarly over-cumbersome organizations. Failure to steer the ship as it becomes too top-heavy (e.g. kill R&D immediately; outsource all the things).
To echo [1] the Xerox example, the C-suite became entirely made-up of former salesmen who'd become addicted to the pavlovian `click`ing sound their massive copiers made in bill-per-page leases... which blinded them from realizing the digitizing world wasn't going to favor their no-risk-taking approach.
`click` - `click` - `click` – late 60's ASMR erotica for Xerox VPs.
Tech today sells dopamine to end users. Those companies were huge industrial type giants at the time, especially GE, and sold to enterprises large and small.
Companies can do financial tricks but end users can’t.
Uvix
Intel, Broadcom, and Nvidia.
helsinkiandrew
They also currently have one of the largest debt burdens of their group ($13B - 75% of shareholder equity)
MichaelZuo
Mortgaged what future?
The linked article doesn’t even try to complete the argument… there’s not a single reason offered why TI could plausibly have increased total revenues more… instead of just spinning their wheels from a higher cost base.
Or to put it another way, why wouldn’t that revenue growth have gone to their competitors?, which did in fact happen.
_heimdall
As many here have said it seems most likely this is hollow PR. It is also possible, though, that the government has decided building chips in the US is actually a national security concern and TI is one of the companies that could make that happen with enough printed money.
londons_explore
I assume they're about to get a bunch of taxpayers funds for such a thing...
uncletaco
Nope. This is Foxconn all over again.
detourdog
One way is $6 billion over 10 years is $60 billion.
knicholes
You mean $6 billion EVERY year for ten years. $6 billion over ten years would be amortization and be a total of $6 billion.
detourdog
Yes, sorry for the confusion.
chneu
CEO doing it to get quick cash from Trump.
Any company large/influential enough to get in front of trump right now is gonna be in the news saying this stuff. The entire admin runs on "the last person to convince trump".
Trump pardoned a bunch of criminals, drug dealers, and other trash people because the right person talked to him at the right time.
This is exactly what people said would happen. It's open season for bribery
pjmlp
Watching from this side of the Atlantic, and being from a country that was under dictorship, I think anyone hoping they only need to hold on to some future elections, haven't paid that much attention during history classes.
dummydummy1234
The hopeful side is that he is old, and most people voted him in because they did not like inflation and he promised he would bring prices down on day 1.
pjmlp
He might be old, but isn't alone, if authoritarianism isn't fought, others will carry on the work.
jfengel
Has anything changed their minds? Given the opportunity, would they vote for him again? Or his chosen successor?
His popularity has decreased somewhat, but given a choice between him and the opposition, I suspect that they would continue to do the same thing.
He may indeed pass but I'm not so sure that would change much.
yeah, nepotism has always being around, it is just more obvious now, before one would need laundry money through some what seemly acceptable foundations.
lostlogin
I see this argument where I live too. I think it minimises what’s going on. Saying ‘they did it too, but more it was more subtle’ is a defence, and a ‘whataboutism’.
euroderf
It's not bribery. It's lubricating the machinery of government...
speed_spread
To slide downhill.
bamboozled
It's just pretend to keep the current admin happy, they know he won't be around for long.
bjakes(dead)
[dead]
marbro(dead)
[dead]
spiderfarmer
Can’t blame them for trying to pry a few dollars from an administration that seems desperate to show some wins.
Moto7451
Especially when the reality of building and permitting will mean someone else, even if it’s from the current administration, will be in power long after the check is cashed and ground broken if it even happens. Because of the time scale there’s plenty of time for the “aw shucks it didn’t work out” if that’s the better path. Hitting a few milestones but not enough to actually break ground can be exceptionally profitable.
chrsw
It's simply not cost effective to manufacture advanced semiconductors at scale in the USA. No company, not Intel, not TI, not GlobalFoundries not even TSMC is clever enough to overcome this.
Now, if there are other reasons to do this like for defense or supply chain security, that's a different story. But it will cost you.
Knowing these facts changes your perspective on these semis-in-the-USA news headlines.
ImJamal
You know some are already made in the US, right?
Intel makes something like 50% - 75% of theirs in the US.
chrsw
And look what is happening to Intel
ImJamal
Do you have any evidence that it is the location of their fabs rather than all of the other issues they have?
Animats
What's a "foundational semiconductor"?
This seems to be a political term, not one the electronics industry uses.[1] "Foundational chips (also called “legacy,” “lagging edge,” and “mature node” semiconductors) are often defined as chips made with a 22nm manufacturing process or above."
Is there actually a lack of 22nm and larger fab capacity in the US? Or is it just that they're not being used much.
FD-SOI fabs are lacking. It's a planar transistor technology used frequently in very low power/thermal devices with small packages and with a high SEU tolerance. Lattice semiconductor use them in their FPGAs, which are the lowest power draw FPGAs on the market at the moment, with a really flat power curve all the way up to 125C. They're used everywhere in A&D and industrial, as root-of-trust devices on servers, and are the largest FPGA manufacturer by volume.
Currently it's fabbed in France (STMicro), Germany (GF), and South Korea (Samsung). No plans to onshore that in the US.
bgnn
22FDX of GF is also produced in Malta, NY.
JumpCrisscross
> What's a "foundational semiconductor"?
What PA and Fairchild did. We haven’t had a new-entrant opening for fundamental semiconductor design for decades, a fact laid bare in their top engineers’ comp. (No clue if this is what they are actually doing.)
Yes, there is a lack of that tech. Power devices and any mid-complexity mixed signal devices use higher nodes like 22, 55, or even larger geometries. Not a lot of that capacity in the states and it seems to be mostly held by players that own their own fabs. Fabless semiconductor companies don’t have many options besides overseas.
cwal37
Also already building a new fab up in Sherman, Texas.
Fabs have pretty decent electricity demand, I actually sited a battery against that one after we did a bit of modeling with the new load vs the solar flows in the area. Siting just means make a land deal, figure out easements, and start working its way through the queue. Might not ever get built though, lot of money and hurdles in the way ha.
Every time I see an industrial announcement like this power is the first thing I think of - where it’s gonna come from and what impact it will have on the existing grid.
alephnerd
Most of these projects invest heavily in renewable energy, becuase the scale makes it cost efficient. During the Biden era, there were a bunch of additional incentives to push for renewable investments in these projects, on top of Texas's very generous renewable tech incentives - most ONG companies began investing heavily in renewables all the way back in the 2000s because they're ENERGY conglomerates first and foremost.
If you have a beating pulse and a strong renewable tech IP, you will raise a seed successfully from the Saudi PIF or Cheveron Ventures even in this market. Sadly, this is HN, not Bookface, so most ideas are bad ideas. Sucks too because it was a very fruitful demo days - one of the more impactful over the past several years.
ano-ther
It seems like a reprise of this December 2024 announcement re CHIPS act during the previous administration.
The fact sheets (linked on the page) amount to $51bn from what I can see.
"we are honored to work alongside them and the U.S. government to unleash what’s next in American innovation.”
They're expecting to get money from government to make this happen. If it will be done is anyone's guess.
chneu
Step 1: Announce American Investment.
Step 2: stroke Trump's ego
Step 3: receive money
Step 4: foxconn their way to the bank
georgeecollins
This should be one of the biggest wins for US manufacturing since the Foxconn plant in Wisconsin. /s
Moto7451
This is what immediately popped in my mind. What’s that definition of insanity again…
I’d love it if things were streamlined when building. Just as a homeowner it’s amazing how hard it can be to get a permit or an inspection. The lame duct tape fix seems to me some weird CMS and ArcGIS, as if that somehow fixes the human and policy problems.
anitil
For those out of the loop but who enjoy podcasts, there is a Reply All episode about this [0] though somehow I can't find a direct link as spotify seems to have swallowed all of gimlet and killed the links. I couldn't even find a transcript.
Do they actually plan this, or is it just to make the current administration happy? $60B sounds like a lot of money.
cwal37
They’ve steadily expanded over the years, I wouldn’t be surprised if this was real. It’s not just calculators, TI chips show up in a lot of military hardware in particular.
bigfatkitten
There are a lot of markets where TI is king, such as in battery management ICs.
jdsully
They make really good VCO+PLL chips. Ultra low phase noise.
xvilka
DSPs as well
UncleOxidant
which generally cost pennies.
wongarsu
Which is why they are not planning to make cutting edge semiconductors in the new plant but "foundational semiconductors" aka old nodes that now cost pennies
If you want to build a fleet of infantry drones and you want to source components from the US there’s a lot of these and many others to buy. Not sure if there’s $60B of them there but they’ll figure out how to waste this much I’m sure.
hiddenfinance
Well if you look at how Feds has being pumping money into Musk's bank account and what brought down the SVB, then $60B may not be that much. At this point as the country that can prints/(adjust db ledger) $60B is nothing.
wsc981
I just want them to make a newer version of the TI-99/4A.
lightedman
Wouldn't it be funny to see that CPU produced on a modern node?
Given the low transistor count, you could probably achieve speeds in the multi-10s of GHz, it would be so small.
A multi-core 99/4A would be hilarious to witness.
kragen
With MESI cache coherence, maybe you could migrate the whole workspace for your subroutine into a line of your core's L1D cache, and make it perform like hardware registers while retaining the pleasantly parsimonious TMS 990 architectural semantics?
cchance
It's 1/3rd the valuation of the company... its not real lol
duxup
Their announcement seems to be a mix of new and already announced expansions.
acdha
They’re making a political advertisement to get favors for things they already did. The meat of the announcement is that the plants started under the Biden administration are continuing as planned – which is an accomplishment of sorts given how complex fabs are – and they’d really like to continue getting the CHIPS act funding which Trump periodically talks about cancelling because it was a Biden-era law even though it had strong support from Republicans who favor investing in important domestic industries, especially in their districts:
Based on every one of these promises ever, yes. It's probably somewhere between vaporware and a small tertiary facility.
ashwinsundar
What are some things TI promised on, but failed to deliver?
Retric
Number of new jobs for one. They just laid off ~300 people working on an older node in Lehi, Utah, while now claiming they’re going to bring new jobs to Lehi, Utah. Thus “new jobs” don’t really track the actual change in the number of their employees even just at the local level across even moderate timescales.
Similarly hyping up total R&D spending without a tight timeframe is meaningless, they will eventually spend X$ assuming the company survives indefinitely.
More charitably there’s meaningful differences between nodes, but it’s likely a significant portion of the workforce will be rehires.
I feel like this is a fairly small investment on the scale of the semiconductor industry, although it would be large for a single company if we were talking about a single year. See, for example, https://wccftech.com/chinese-chip-giant-smic-shaken-by-tarif... US$7.5 billion in capex at SMIC this year. But SMIC is just the largest of dozens of Mainland China semiconductor firms, and a lot of that investment is going into cutting-edge strategic nodes, not 180nm stuff from last millennium.
Don't get me wrong, you need that stuff from last millennium—not just 180nm but also the 6 μm I suspect "foundational" actually refers to. You need power regulation, precision measurement, and RF frontends in analog, and analog can't scale down the way digital can. And TI actually retains a world-leading position in those chips, with better and cheaper ICs than anything out of Mainland China today. But it's potentially a game of chasing China's taillights.
SiGe might be an exception; even at 130nm, IHP's SiGe BiCMOS process can hit 450GHz oscillation frequency and 350GHz ft, so even at fairly coarse process node sizes, SiGe could be a strategic enabling technology for submillimeter communication such as Starlink, which is reportedly critical for weapons such as Ukraine's naval drones.
synack
Last I checked, a lot of the US manufactured dies got shipped overseas for packaging. I wonder when they'll have that capability domestically.
alephnerd
Yes.
CHIPS invested heavily in OSAT and Packaging capacity - especially in TX. Samsung, Micron, OmSemi, and TI took full advantage of that under the Biden admin while Intel and TSMC were fighting on the airwaves to undermine each other.
Much of the rest has been reinvested in SK and India (TI is part of the SCL Mohali modernization RFP) as part of the QUAD+ initiative.
A lot of us in the private and public sector working in this space aren't idiots.
newsclues
Need a new rule: you have to write the cheque before you receive congratulations for an announcement
rajnathani
The adjective "foundational" for semiconductors can be ignored here, it is simply that TI will make more of their existing chips in the US with nothing being different in their current IC lineup of mostly MCUs, ADCs, etc simple ICs.
kragen
Really? You don't think it means specifically "old"? Because TI also makes new chips like their MSPM0 microcontroller lineup. Are those "foundational" too?
anonnon
Worth noting that TI primarily makes logic semiconductors, and those don't require the advanced 2nm, 3nm or even 5nm node processes that TSMC's and Samsung's most advanced fabs support. However logic semiconductors may have special operating constraints, like extremes of temperature, that the semiconductors produced by foundries don't require.
lightedman
Hopefully they invest in actual QC.
I hate doing a first article, seeing nothing wrong on the IC side of the LED board, then apply power and have the IC explode and rocket off the board, taking traces and pads with it (or if I'm lucky, it just craters its packaging.)
And it is BAD. I'm talking 1/20 kind of bad, off multiple reels (I've gone though tens of thousands of them.) Only TI stuff.
delfugal
Plans "to invest" can always change.
Appears someone has been promised a tax break along with Mar-a-lago chocolate cake.
mNovak
The article mentions SiGe at the Sherman site, which is an RF node. These are usually at 22-100+ nm scale, so "mature" or "foundational" compared to 2nm stuff, but the really tight nodes aren't always inherently better for RF.
dzonga
the TSMC founder was once a Ti employee. Yet due to cism he got denied the opportunity to steer the org. Now it's time to play to trump's whims and earn a quick payout.
Jensen Huang also interviewed at TI but took his first semiconductor job at AMD instead.
ranguna
These are the kind of figures the EU should be looking at. Not the meagre hundreds of millions.
jt2190
I was wondering where the money comes from. This article [1] says it's government money provided through the CHIPS act:
> In December, the [prior] administration finalized a $1.61 billion government subsidy for Texas Instruments to support construction of three new facilities after the company announced plans to invest at least $18 billion under the $52.7 billion CHIPS and Science bill.
Edit: Did the HN link change? I thought the link was to a TI press release with few details.
insane_dreamer
Where is Ti getting $60B from?
ruined
anyone know if their fab automation scripts are still not under version control
Titan2189
tell us more
phendrenad2
I'll believe it when I can buy an op-amp or mosfet with a little "USA" etched onto it. Til then, it's as fake as Foxconn and TSMC.
alnwlsn
TI chips already have a little Texas engraved on them....
romain_batlle
what's up with those AI generated articles?
OhMeadhbh
So the chips they don't have in stock will be made in the US? So what?
TMWNNOP
Title shortened by me from "Texas Instruments plans to invest more than $60 billion to manufacture billions of foundational semiconductors in the U.S."
How are they going to afford an investment thats ~1/3rd the value of the company? Seems like one of those announcements that no one follows up on to keep them honest?
Much like that “initiative”, I imagine this won’t materialize either, they’re largely hoping government funds get steered toward them and by which point they’ll pocket everything they can while delivering a minimum of what was promised, if anything at all, and they won’t be properly held accountable for it.
Construction of the first data center Abilene, Texas site is ongoing. Emily Chang visited the site over a month ago and got video footage [1]. So it's not nothing. Will they actually invest 500 billion in the end? I dunno; I guess we'll see. The main challenges seem to be the availability of electrical power and skilled workers, not demand, investment or ambition.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhIJs4zbH0o
1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcZxaFfxloo
That was a project by Oracle to build some data centres, many of which had already broke ground and were under construction, and they pulled OpenAI and Softbank in to give it that AI veneer.
So it's stuff that is really happening, and was already happening. Similarly this TI plant was announced under the prior administration as a win of the chips act, and again it's being recycled to current.
This sort of shell game works for a while, but a couple of years the bill comes due.
He wants credit for everything while doing nothing.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/t...
And still.
General Electric was (just a few decades ago) the largest non-gold asset, and isn't even Top 50 anymore.
Saudi Aramco was (just a few years ago) the largest non-gold asset, and isn't even Top 10 anymore.
If you want to read about similarities in Xerox's own hubris/downfall, Dealers of Lightning is one of my favorite non-fiction reads of the past few years (about their SFbay PARC Labs of the 70s/80s... and its failures to adapt).
The "Computer Associates" of today is... Salesforce.
Have they really improved Tableau, Heroku, Mulesoft, Sendgrid, Slack, now Informatica?
To echo [1] the Xerox example, the C-suite became entirely made-up of former salesmen who'd become addicted to the pavlovian `click`ing sound their massive copiers made in bill-per-page leases... which blinded them from realizing the digitizing world wasn't going to favor their no-risk-taking approach.
`click` - `click` - `click` – late 60's ASMR erotica for Xerox VPs.
[1] amazon.com/Dealers-Lightning-Xerox-PARC-Computer-ebook/dp/B0029PBVCA
Companies can do financial tricks but end users can’t.
The linked article doesn’t even try to complete the argument… there’s not a single reason offered why TI could plausibly have increased total revenues more… instead of just spinning their wheels from a higher cost base.
Or to put it another way, why wouldn’t that revenue growth have gone to their competitors?, which did in fact happen.
Any company large/influential enough to get in front of trump right now is gonna be in the news saying this stuff. The entire admin runs on "the last person to convince trump".
Trump pardoned a bunch of criminals, drug dealers, and other trash people because the right person talked to him at the right time.
This is exactly what people said would happen. It's open season for bribery
His popularity has decreased somewhat, but given a choice between him and the opposition, I suspect that they would continue to do the same thing.
He may indeed pass but I'm not so sure that would change much.
Now, if there are other reasons to do this like for defense or supply chain security, that's a different story. But it will cost you.
Knowing these facts changes your perspective on these semis-in-the-USA news headlines.
Intel makes something like 50% - 75% of theirs in the US.
This seems to be a political term, not one the electronics industry uses.[1] "Foundational chips (also called “legacy,” “lagging edge,” and “mature node” semiconductors) are often defined as chips made with a 22nm manufacturing process or above."
Is there actually a lack of 22nm and larger fab capacity in the US? Or is it just that they're not being used much.
[1] https://selectcommitteeontheccp.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites...
Currently it's fabbed in France (STMicro), Germany (GF), and South Korea (Samsung). No plans to onshore that in the US.
What PA and Fairchild did. We haven’t had a new-entrant opening for fundamental semiconductor design for decades, a fact laid bare in their top engineers’ comp. (No clue if this is what they are actually doing.)
What is it that Fairchild and "PA" did that makes them foundational?
ON Semi is the successor of Motorola's semiconductor business.
[1] https://www.onsemi.com/company/about-onsemi/locations
Fabs have pretty decent electricity demand, I actually sited a battery against that one after we did a bit of modeling with the new load vs the solar flows in the area. Siting just means make a land deal, figure out easements, and start working its way through the queue. Might not ever get built though, lot of money and hurdles in the way ha.
Every time I see an industrial announcement like this power is the first thing I think of - where it’s gonna come from and what impact it will have on the existing grid.
If you have a beating pulse and a strong renewable tech IP, you will raise a seed successfully from the Saudi PIF or Cheveron Ventures even in this market. Sadly, this is HN, not Bookface, so most ideas are bad ideas. Sucks too because it was a very fruitful demo days - one of the more impactful over the past several years.
The fact sheets (linked on the page) amount to $51bn from what I can see.
https://www.ti.com/about-ti/newsroom/news-releases/2024/2024...
"we are honored to work alongside them and the U.S. government to unleash what’s next in American innovation.”
They're expecting to get money from government to make this happen. If it will be done is anyone's guess.
Step 2: stroke Trump's ego
Step 3: receive money
Step 4: foxconn their way to the bank
I’d love it if things were streamlined when building. Just as a homeowner it’s amazing how hard it can be to get a permit or an inspection. The lame duct tape fix seems to me some weird CMS and ArcGIS, as if that somehow fixes the human and policy problems.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/gimlet/comments/a3lyny/reply_all_13...
Given the low transistor count, you could probably achieve speeds in the multi-10s of GHz, it would be so small.
A multi-core 99/4A would be hilarious to witness.
https://www.texastribune.org/2025/03/12/texas-congress-corny...
Similarly hyping up total R&D spending without a tight timeframe is meaningless, they will eventually spend X$ assuming the company survives indefinitely.
More charitably there’s meaningful differences between nodes, but it’s likely a significant portion of the workforce will be rehires.
Don't get me wrong, you need that stuff from last millennium—not just 180nm but also the 6 μm I suspect "foundational" actually refers to. You need power regulation, precision measurement, and RF frontends in analog, and analog can't scale down the way digital can. And TI actually retains a world-leading position in those chips, with better and cheaper ICs than anything out of Mainland China today. But it's potentially a game of chasing China's taillights.
SiGe might be an exception; even at 130nm, IHP's SiGe BiCMOS process can hit 450GHz oscillation frequency and 350GHz ft, so even at fairly coarse process node sizes, SiGe could be a strategic enabling technology for submillimeter communication such as Starlink, which is reportedly critical for weapons such as Ukraine's naval drones.
CHIPS invested heavily in OSAT and Packaging capacity - especially in TX. Samsung, Micron, OmSemi, and TI took full advantage of that under the Biden admin while Intel and TSMC were fighting on the airwaves to undermine each other.
Much of the rest has been reinvested in SK and India (TI is part of the SCL Mohali modernization RFP) as part of the QUAD+ initiative.
A lot of us in the private and public sector working in this space aren't idiots.
I hate doing a first article, seeing nothing wrong on the IC side of the LED board, then apply power and have the IC explode and rocket off the board, taking traces and pads with it (or if I'm lucky, it just craters its packaging.)
And it is BAD. I'm talking 1/20 kind of bad, off multiple reels (I've gone though tens of thousands of them.) Only TI stuff.
Jensen Huang also interviewed at TI but took his first semiconductor job at AMD instead.
> In December, the [prior] administration finalized a $1.61 billion government subsidy for Texas Instruments to support construction of three new facilities after the company announced plans to invest at least $18 billion under the $52.7 billion CHIPS and Science bill.
[1] "Texas Instruments plans $60 billion US investment under Trump push" https://www.reuters.com/business/texas-instruments-plans-inv...
Edit: Did the HN link change? I thought the link was to a TI press release with few details.
CNBC: <https://www.cnbc.com/2025/06/18/texas-instruments-plans-60-b...>