Evidence receipt / belief
Published · transcript-backedNathan Lambert: belief
3 Feb 2025 Lex Fridman Podcast #459 – DeepSeek, China, OpenAI, NVIDIA, xAI, TSMC, Stargate, and AI Megaclusters
“I think if you have the demand and the money is on the line, the American companies figure it out. It’s going to take handholding with the government, but I think that the culture helps TSMC break through and it’s easier for them.”
Source trail
Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Nathan Lambert
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- belief
- Recorded
- 3 Feb 2025
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
Transcript context
…Is some of it also culture, like you said, extreme competence, extreme work ethic in Taiwan? I think if you have the demand and the money is on the line, the American companies figure it out. It’s going to take handholding with the government, but I think that the culture helps TSMC break through and it’s easier for them. You [inaudible 01:47:50]. TSMC has some like 90,000 employees. It’s not actually that insane amount. The Arizona fab has 3,000 from Taiwan. And these people, their wives were like, “Yeah, we’re not going to have kids unless you sign up for the Arizona Fab. We go to Arizona and we have our kids there.” There’s also a Japan fab where the same thing happened. And so these wives drove these dudes to go to Japan or America to have the kids there. And it’s an element of culture, yeah, sure. Taiwan works that hard. But also, like the US has done it in the past, they could do it now. We can just import, I say import, the best people in the world if we want to.…
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