Darpa and Texas Bet $1.4b on Unique Foundry -3d Heterogeneous Integration
Postedabout 2 months agoActiveabout 2 months ago
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Semiconductor ManufacturingDarpa FundingHeterogeneous Integration
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Semiconductor Manufacturing
Darpa Funding
Heterogeneous Integration
DARPA and Texas are investing $1.4B in a unique foundry for 3D heterogeneous integration, sparking discussion on the implications for the semiconductor industry and national security.
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Nov 11, 2025 at 6:33 AM EST
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ID: 45886191Type: storyLast synced: 11/20/2025, 6:42:50 PM
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https://www.skywatertechnology.com/heterogeneous-integration...
In this case it's an institute attached to a big university (University of Texas) that is scaling up an R&D idea, that happens to be useful for the military https://www.statesman.com/story/business/2024/07/18/semicond...
Meanwhile the subsidy should be going to every company in the industry so then they still have to compete with each other.
Or to put it a different way, what's really the difference between a subsidy and a tax cut?
Boston Dynamics has had humanoid robots doing parkour for years now and nobody needs a robot to do parkour. This was also a hint.
The Texas state government's annual budget is well over $300 billion, so it's not a huge amount of money for them.
If my light research is correct, Texas founded its own CHIPS act in 2023, and shortly after appropriated 552 mil to the UT TIE program. The DARPA money commitment came a year later.
People always try to distinguish these as if they're completely different, but a refundable tax credit and a subsidy are just two different terms for the same thing.
But there'd be a huge difference between giving me a 500mil investment vs giving me 500mil in tax breaks.
Obviously most fall into the former camp, but it's also optics. One feels like taking money from taxpayers and giving it out, the other less so. It's a little more bold to hand out money than to just not collect it IMO.
Which is effectively the same thing that happens even with non-refundable credits for large conglomerates, because they were paying enough in taxes from their other business units to eat the whole thing, while they're still consuming other government services. In order to make that fair to smaller companies and individuals, someone with a non-refundable credit that they couldn't use should be able to sell it to an unrelated business who could use it. But then it would just sell for approximately its face value and affect the government budget in exactly the same amount as if it was a refundable credit, which is why tax credits should always be refundable.