A semiconductor fab does not require that many people so the wages should not matter that much.
And the relative amount invested is probably not that important. For the US it's important that there is at least some fairly high volume produced of the latest manufacturing nodes.
Right now nothing is produced in the US of the latest node, as they are manufactured in Taiwan and South Korea.
Whatever the number, relatively speaking, it's basically peanuts compared to the number and value of the wafers and chips they are spitting out.
It's advanced machines doing most of it, and there is an operator handling each machine. The machines are extremely expensive, the building is extremely expensive, the ventilation/filtration/air control system is expensive etc.
These are not smartphone factories.
What is expensive is running these fabs/lines at half the capacity.
I used min. wage as a Fermi solution - back of the envelope - since I am not an industry expert or insider and the product was an HN comment.
The article about the Ohio plant was quoted for the 50,000 jobs figure.
I am interested in manufacturing in general coming back to the U.S., so it intrigued me that S. Korea is making the "world's largest chip center" contrasted with all of the news I've been hearing over the past 5 years about chip manufacturing as an investment strategy in the U.S.
> fairly high volume produced of the latest manufacturing nodes
By the time a fab is completed, it is often no longer in the "latest manufacturing nodes", specifically when it was not in the "latest manufacturing nodes" even at planning stages.
And the relative amount invested is probably not that important. For the US it's important that there is at least some fairly high volume produced of the latest manufacturing nodes.
Right now nothing is produced in the US of the latest node, as they are manufactured in Taiwan and South Korea.