Nuclear proliferation is a very, very bad analogy for your proposal
Actually, it’s fantastic because everyone predicted that nuclear proliferation would fail abysmally within decades of starting and practically every nation would possess nukes, which couldn’t have been more wrong. Chip fabs and more advanced chips are even harder than nukes because to continue the Moore’s law, we can translate into atomic bomb terms: “another country must not just create A-bombs, not just create H-bombs, but actually push the atomic bomb frontier exponentially, to bombs orders of magnitude more powerful than the state of the art, to bombs not just in the gigaton range but to the teraton range.” This dramatically brings out just how difficult the task is.
It may theoretically be in a country’s interest to make a chip fabs, but chips are small & hugely fungible so they will capture little of the surplus, in contrast to atomic bombs which never leave their hands.
And then even if they do, a country like the People’s Republic of China blowing off the existential risk, then going ahead with its own domestic efforts.
How many decades would it take the PRC to catch up? Their only existing designs are based on industrial espionage of Intel & AMD processors, my understanding was. How many decades with the active opposition of either the US or a world government such that they can use no foreign suppliers for any of the hundreds and thousands of extremely specialized steps and technologies required to make merely a state of the art chip, never mind advancing the state of the art as Moore’s law requires?
Actually, it’s fantastic because everyone predicted that nuclear proliferation would fail abysmally within decades of starting and practically every nation would possess nukes, which couldn’t have been more wrong. Chip fabs and more advanced chips are even harder than nukes because to continue the Moore’s law, we can translate into atomic bomb terms: “another country must not just create A-bombs, not just create H-bombs, but actually push the atomic bomb frontier exponentially, to bombs orders of magnitude more powerful than the state of the art, to bombs not just in the gigaton range but to the teraton range.” This dramatically brings out just how difficult the task is.
It may theoretically be in a country’s interest to make a chip fabs, but chips are small & hugely fungible so they will capture little of the surplus, in contrast to atomic bombs which never leave their hands.
How many decades would it take the PRC to catch up? Their only existing designs are based on industrial espionage of Intel & AMD processors, my understanding was. How many decades with the active opposition of either the US or a world government such that they can use no foreign suppliers for any of the hundreds and thousands of extremely specialized steps and technologies required to make merely a state of the art chip, never mind advancing the state of the art as Moore’s law requires?