A Few Hundred Billion Dollars Won’t Fix All the Shortages
Throwing money at the problem won’t solve anything. Fresh finance needs to be targeted at the bottlenecks and those sectors at the bleeding edge.
Focus the funding where it’s needed most.
Photographer: Eva Hambach/AFP/Getty Images
Governments are making multibillion-dollar announcements to deal with the global chip shortage. That's unlikely to help at this point and only risks muddying priorities for the future.
Following the U.S. and the European Union, Japan has announced large capital investments in the semiconductor industry as part of a bigger 55.7 trillion yen ($488 billion) economic relief package. All told, over this year and the next, outlays could total close to $200 billion, according to Jefferies analysts. So far, allocation of the funds remains quite vague but much of it is being directed toward future technology, with the goal to fund the build-out of vast parts of the semiconductor supply chain.