It's important for citizens to understand the relative strengths and weaknesses of the Canadian and US economy before they decide that the country needs a 'deal'. I've brought together a bunch of background info that I haven't heard much of from the legacy media. I think it suggests Canada is doing a whole lot better than America right now. https://billhulet.substack.com/p/my-hot-take-on-the-current-trade

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[–] AGM@lemmy.ca 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Of course, TSMC is also doing incredibly well out of manufacturing, but not as well as Nvidia which still has like 75% margins on their GPUs and nets like 50% on them. Not sure what Google's margins are on their TPUs, but I'm sure they're also high and they are making huge returns on serving inference.

As to the Canadian compound semiconductor fab, it seems great and may be very worthwhile, but again it's pretty small potatoes in the industry:

A detailed economic analysis indicates that a commercial-scale compound semiconductor fab could generate 10,000 new jobs, $10–15 billion in GDP over ten years

Nvidia's profits last year were 10× the upper bound of what the potential Canadian fab is promoting as a possible 10-year gross impact on GDP.

The industry is a point where capital demands and returns are so extreme that GPU access is having to be sold like bonds to the biggest asset managers on the planet just to feed the CAPEX to meet demand, and that's a big part of why the frontier is a two-horse race that we're not in. Again, that's not to say Canadian businesses can't make money during all this, but the players that are going to dominate this space are not coming from Canada.

[–] ProudCanadianCitizen@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 week ago

An old adage in the industry says that the first GPU out of the fab plant costs $1 billion dollars but the nest one costs $5. The actual making of the chip itself, since so many of them can be made from the same die, is not that costly. The total cost of designing and developing the GPU is enormous and a significant chunk of the profit from each GPU sold goes to developing the net model. Although Nvidia's balance sheet looks good, it is only as good as the next iteration.