Technology

State planning and funding those plans. Taiwan, S. Korea and China (among others) have all planned their chip manufacturing capabilities and appropriately funded their development. Instead of relying on markets and firms to decide to do it, their governments decided that chips are strategically important input to their (and others') economies and directed funding and labor to create those production capacities - education, machines, factories, etc. Critically we also used to do this in Europe and North America but we decided we'll let the market make those decisions based on profit alone since the 80s. Turns out that the market had somewhat different ideas for making profit. Which is unsurprising since chip design and manufacturing is inherently long-term affair while threre's plenty of profit to be made in short term lower risk bets. We still have an edge on the design side but I think it's a matter of time till planners overtake us on that front too. You see what's happening with Intel, laying highly skilled people off, investment banker directors considering selling their factories to TSMC, and the America First government proposing a foreign takeover instead of directing public capital and setting long term goals.