America’s second-rate status in memory chip output, however, is nothing new. It dates to the late 1980s, when Japan first overtook the U.S. in DRAM output. The big shift in recent years is the collapse in the share of logic chips produced in the United States. Today, building an advanced logic fab costs $20 billion, an enormous capital investment that few firms can afford. As with memory chips, there’s a correlation between the number of chips a firm produces and its yield—the number of chips that actually work. Given the benefits of scale, the number of firms fabricating advanced logic chips
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