its not that the USA can't produce semi-conductors. Its that semi-conductor production, at TSMC's scale (both in terms of number of units, yield rates, and depth) currently requires highly skilled workers to work a lot of their hours to "baby sit" the wafer production.
Maybe there is a world where TSMC can hire enough skilled workers and optimize processes enabling people to go home at 5p, but that is not currently the case.
Yes. This. So, yeah, essentially fundamentally incompatible with the US economy.
The US is going to have to heavily subsidize the payroll of tens of thousands of very accomplished EEs/etc to make this work. By doing that they will also wreck the HW part of SV.
There isn't really a HW part of SV. Hardware engineers aren't paid well enough to live there in droves like programmers. There are some of course, but the ones I know are in San Diego or Bremerton or Israel.
Also, it's completely normal to run a factory 24/7. I think people are just impressed because TSMC is the only one they've read about?
(However, it's correct that a TSMC fab is the most advanced and complicated process on the planet.)
Maybe there is a world where TSMC can hire enough skilled workers and optimize processes enabling people to go home at 5p, but that is not currently the case.