It’s the car makers own fault, they cancelled their chip orders, then looked aghast when they could not get them back, Not to mention pissing off the foundry by cancelling your order doesn’t exactly win you brownie points when you next come calling…
Growth in 5G, automotive, and IoT shipments has helped keep pressure on the foundry market in ways industry experts didn’t foresee in 2005 or 2010, and that means there wasn’t much slack in the 200mm or legacy 300mm markets to start with. Then the pandemic hit, and car manufacturers cut their orders. TSMC allocated that capacity away to other companies. The car industry failed to understand it takes several months to make a microprocessor & didn’t give the foundries sufficient lead time to scale manufacturing back up.
“Tech Britain” would pour millions billions into attempting to build our own semiconductors and fail miserably.
Have a look at the costs and timescales in building and operating a semiconductor chip fab. TMC in the far east spent £10 billion on their last one and the next is rumoured to be £16 billion. Average time to build = 3-5 years.
New fabs are being built, constantly. In 2016, there were 97 fabs building 300mm wafers, worldwide. Today there are 127. New fabs are always coming online. But fabs are built for many purposes and not all fabs build microprocessors. Some fabs build DRAM and NAND instead of logic.
In life, it's not who you know that's important, it's how your wife found out.