$585B on new fabs, $357B on AI data centers, and $5.8B on humanoid robots. One of those numbers is not like the others

Humanoid robots that can do manual labor are going to be make or break for wealthy economies in the next two decades. Aging populations need help, and most successful nations do not have enough young people to do half the work they need done.

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> Humanoid robots are like dance lessons, it is cool, it is sexy, and it may pay off in the future, but the value is much less certain

They need a solution to their plummeting birthrates which are officially worse than either China’s or Japan’s

The value is pretty clear. The problem is the pay off is uncertain.

I’d say it’s more like “on groceries and a fancy dinner”. Humanoid robots sure do need RAM, both in data centres for training and in the robots themselves. :)

They had a large memory manufacturer, Infineon, who spun out their memory division as Qimonda which then went bankrupt [1]. They were the 2nd largest in the world at one time apparently. Looking back, it's easy to say the German govt should have thrown them a billion or two to keep them afloat. However, state intervention was very unpopular at the time in economic circles, and there was much furor over bailouts following the 2008 crisis.

Japan has an even sadder story. They were the DRAM top dog for a very long time. South Korea entirely ate their lunch.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qimonda

> I wonder how Germany missed the semi manufacturing train?

My best guess is that the connecting train was operated by the Deutsche Bahn

Realistically, when it comes to the semiconductor market, there aren't many viable options outside of East Asia. I don't mean this in the sense that East Asians were somehow "chosen," but rather that the semiconductor industry inherently requires a large number of highly educated employees working together. The problem is that the working hours inevitably end up being very long. If you actually go work at one of those facilities, you have to wear a "cleanroom suit" (bunny suit), and it's physically demanding. What I'm saying is, you need highly educated personnel who can be mobilized at any time when a problem breaks out in the middle of the night, and who can be hired at relatively low cost. East Asia has a massive educational infrastructure — schools are very large-scale and the system is extremely well-developed — making it hard for other regions to compete. And indeed, the average working hours in countries that do semiconductor manufacturing are extremely long

In other words, it's an industry where you have to grind white-collar workers as if they were blue-collar laborers.

Chip fab locations have traditionally had more political than economic importance. Matrix multiplication chips and RAM have been the recent exception, while TSMC has long been the geopolitical exception. ASML's location only matters to the extent that it gets ordered not to sell to someone.

The AMD spinoff GlobalFoundries has a fab in Dresden.

Intel was supposed to build a fab in Magdeburg, which would have been great, but apparently the reason it was canned (2025) was they couldn't secure enough customers.

IIRC Taiwan took a page out of Singapore's playbook and went all in on electrical engineering and adjecent fields. It was very much a long-term strategy. Germany probably didn't feel nearly as much pressure, and was already very strong in all industry.

The Germany fetish still going strong I see.

Memory has only really recently become lucrative. Germany still has heavy machinery, trains, drilling machines etc all of which will be needed for a long time regardless of whether the "bubble pops" or not.

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Germany is done.

Siemens?

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It's from the president's speech. Too lazy to look up the actual text but I guess he meant "pillars", a common metaphor in East Asia. In English axis and pillar are distinct but in East Asia the line is blurry.

For example, the Japanese word 軸 (jiku) is used to mean the "axis" of a graph, but it is also used in business to mean the "core pillar/backbone" of a strategy (e.g., 経営の軸 keiei no jiku, literally "the axis of management," but conceptually "the pillar of management").

Looks like a lazy translation; the president used a word "대도약" while the Chinese campaign that you're referring is translated into "대약진운동".

The speech was delivered in Korean so this is a choice by a translator. I don’t speak Korean but I asked an LLM and it says …

the phrase used is "대도약" (daedoyak), which literally means "great leap forward" or "great jump forward." This is NOT "대약진" (daeyakjin), which would be the direct translation of China's "Great Leap Forward" (大跃进).

Top signal.

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> Why humanoid? Surely there must be a superior physical form factor than one mimicking human anatomy.

There probably (certainly) is. But if you want to build a multi-purpose platform, you’ll soon be faced with a dumb challenge: nearly all interfaces (door knobs, taps, electric switches, cutlery, sponges, every single button out there, pillow cases, wrenches, hammers, signs…) are made for humans. Placed at human hand level. At human eye level.

Nearly all environments (houses, streets, sidewalks, factory floors, offices, toilets, bathtubs,…) are made for humans. Wide enough and tall enough (or short enough, for bathtubs) to accommodate human bodies.

So until we can find one or more form-factors superior enough to justify we adapt everything around it or them, betting that the easiest way to build a single multi-purpose platform able to do most things (and not n platforms for n+ use cases) is to borrow the shape most things are made for wouldn’t surprise me. Plus, you get a wider market.

And then, once you have happy-ish customers, figure out which of these human attributes and shapes aren’t actually needed to do the job.

There are just a few reasons - humanoid make sense, mostly for multi purpose tasks - where if you want a robot to be multi-job, do almost everything a human can do at work --

If you want a weld you need a 1 arm robot, if a robot to weld, then stack, then push parts on a cart across the factory - then sweep up, then etc.. etc.. perhaps a humanoid is alright.

There will definitely be too many people comfortable with ownership / master relationship with a humanoid robot that will do their bidding.

Human spaces are built for humans. Outdoors cars and quad coppers are a great form but constrained by stars, doors, and low ceiling makes them a poor fit.

Alternatively a 2 foot tall or a 20 foot tall humanoid robots aren’t particularly useful. But a good enough 5-6 foot tall humanoid robot can be swapped into an assembly line wherever a human is currently working without redesigning that workspace.

A lot of training data being collected is coming from people. You have companies paying people to do chores while recording themselves.

Backward compatibility with current meatspace tooling.

Because you can use existing physical equipment with automation, until it’s ready for a full replacement

Because it's what Elon and China say that matters. There are exceptions but Korea is not the land of creativity. At all.

The great aging of working populations:

China: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f8/Populati...

Japan: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2e/Japan_po...

South Korea: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4a/South_Ko...

United States: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c9/US_Popul...

Europe: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/86/Europe_p...

Also the technology carries over to defense purposes

And then there’s the fact that tremendous investment is going into all things AI, and now hard tech

The expected value is "infinite".

automating repetitive physical work doesn’t appeal to you?

For the optimistic case, read this piece by RethinkX:

https://www.rethinkx.com/blog/rethinkx/the-disruption-of-lab...

(Fwiw, >20 years ago RethinkX correctly projected the exponential cost declines of solar and batteries, when everybody else was drawing straight lines.)

All current jobs have human input and output interfaces. If you want to sell new technology then it will be easiest to accommodate the already existing infrastructure.

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They can sell “employees” who don’t require salaries, onboarding, healthcare, 401k, benefits, etc and then leave after two years of being lazy and try to sue you. (This is how it will be marketed)

Sex bots and disposable police. This is basically the future in every dystopian SciFi these politicians and oligarchs grew up watching. This is just living out fantasy.

Since this money belongs to Samsung and Hynix, it cannot be used for charitable activities. However, it is much better to build new cities, semiconductor factories, and power plants than to pay dividends to shareholders. The construction industry is one of the easiest ways to stimulate the economy.

> 1.5tr parameter models

Curious, what's this based off of?