Every subsidized fab groundbreaking — Intel in Ohio, Micron in New York, TSMC in Arizona — triggers the same purchase order months before construction finishes: process tools from the three companies that equip virtually every leading-edge cleanroom on earth. The CHIPS and Science Act's $52.7 billion in subsidies and 25% investment tax credit are structured to pull forward capital spending, and capital spending on a fab is front-loaded into deposition, etch, and metrology tools long before a single wafer ships. The fab owner takes years of construction risk, yield risk, and demand risk. The equipment vendor gets paid on delivery.
This is the oldest arbitrage in industrial policy: subsidize the builder, and the toolmaker collects first. It's the same dynamic that made railroad-equipment suppliers rich during the transcontinental buildout — the operators bore the ruinous economics, the suppliers got cash on delivery.