Renewing Our Commitment to Domestic Manufacturing

To ensure that our country stays at the forefront of digital technologies, our leaders in Washington must do all they can to support US-based companies and their production of the most important components that will become the building blocks of the future.

Bipartisan passage of the CHIPS Act in the previous Congress has a dual purpose: onshore domestic semiconductor manufacturing to benefit our economy and grow jobs and investment, while also reducing our reliance on Asia which is increasingly at the mercy of China.

Investing in the domestic semiconductor industry will not only lower costs for manufacturing and create good-paying jobs, but it will allow our country to bolster our national security agenda of lessening our dependence on foreign nations and their supply chains for critical products.

To maximize the intentions of the CHIPS Act, both campaigns should signal strong support for US producers of semiconductors and help America win the chips race of the 21st century.

China, through its state-owned enterprise Huawei, is currently far ahead of US manufacturers in compound chips production. Just recently a bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers wrote a letter to the Department of Commerce to examine national security threats from China's development of silicon photonics technology, a different type of technology that uses light instead of electrical signals. The select committee is examining whether export control rules should be amended to protect the domestic development of this category of technologies.

That is why they recent announcement of the CHIPS office partnering with the U.S. company Infinera to expand operations in Pennsylvania and California could not have come at a better time and sets America on a path to compete in the photonics space, an important driver of AI technology. This domestic producer uses a different material than the companies developing them in China, called indium phosphide, but this could be part of the answer that the select committee is searching for.

The Biden Administration is walking in the right direction with the CHIPS and Science Act and its support for compound semiconductors. Most recently, the CHIPS office granted more than $90 million in direct federal funding to an American semiconductor manufacturer named Infinera. With this funding, the chipmaker will plan on building new fabrication facilities in both Pennsylvania and California, potentially creating more than 1,700 jobs.

Investments like these from Washington should be applauded not only for their benefits to our domestic production capabilities but also for our competition with our global competitors like China and the broader national security implications.

Regardless of who is in the White House, the use of the CHIPS Act to fund critical technology like compound semiconductors must be supported at all times. Projects like these hold the key to modernizing our economy and infrastructure, while combatting China and politics must not get in the way of them.

Furthermore, our way of gathering intelligence has transformed into a mostly digital methodology. The more we know about global risks and enemies, the better we can defend our home soil, and compound semiconductors are crucial for our intelligence gathering technologies.

Both global and domestic demand for electricity is expected to skyrocket due to the explosion of data centers, electric vehicles, and the emergence of AI.

America can choose to be a leader as the global economy transitions to the next chapter, but it must do so in a bipartisan way, with urgency and focus.

Matt Mackowiak is the president of Potomac Strategy Group, served in the Bush administration, at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, on the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign, and was a senior communications aide to two U.S. Senators and a Governor.

 

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