> It’s the people, facilities and equipment that matter. Those can get picked up by a company or companies that know how to use them.

This trope keeps getting repeated on HN.

No, the point of the top level comment and article is that no US based company will replace Intel's fabs, nor will they form a "better" Intel. This stuff is intensely capital intensive, and nothing short of a government mandate will make any other company spend so much money on such a big risk.

Trust me - if they could have, they would have. Intel's fabs have pretty much been up for sale since Pat was ousted.

The only companies that know how to use the people and the equipment are not US based. TSMC already had an opportunity to buy much of Intel's fabs, and they concluded that shifting their process to match TSMCs would be cost prohibitive.

China taking Taiwan might finally force us to get our act together.

That sounds like you expect a competitive, free market for things as complex as the world's cutting edge CPU or nuclear weapons or fighter jet technology. I think when it gets as specialized and capital intensive as those things, a true free market is less likely to exist.