Steptoe Cyberlaw Podcast

As Congress barrels toward an election that could see at least one house change hands, efforts to squeeze big bills into law are mounting. The one with the best chance (and better than I expected) would drop $52 billion in cash and a boatload of tax breaks on the semiconductor industry. Michael Ellis points out that this is industrial policy without apology, and a throwback to the 1980s, when the government organized SEMATECH, a name derived from “Semiconductor Manufacturing Technology” to shore up U.S. chipmaking. Thanks to a bipartisan consensus on the need to fight a Chinese challenge, and a trimming of provisions that tried to hitch a ride on the bill, there now looks to be a clear path to enactment for this bill.  And if there were doubt about how serious the Chinese challenge in chips will be, an under-covered story revealed that China’s chipmaking champion, SMIC, has been making 7-nanometer chips for months without an announcement. That’s a diameter that Intel and GlobalFoundries, the main U.S. produ