The mechanism: The CHIPS Act's $52.7 billion in subsidies and the Commerce Department's Notice of Funding Opportunity don't just underwrite cleanrooms and lithography tools — the NOFO explicitly directs applicants to build out "site development," supporting infrastructure, and supplier ecosystems around each fab. Intel's Ocotillo campus, TSMC's Fab 21 cluster in Phoenix, and Samsung's Taylor, Texas site are each effectively small cities: tens of thousands of engineers running EDA (electronic design automation) simulation farms, computational lithography, and yield-analytics clusters that behave exactly like AI data centers — thousands of GPUs/CPUs lashed together needing lossless, low-latency, high-bandwidth Ethernet fabric. Add fab automation itself — every wafer-handling robot, metrology tool, and process sensor on a leading-edge line rides a real-time industrial network — and a modern fab needs a data-center-grade backbone as a precondition for producing a single chip. Congress and Commerce get credit for "chips." The networking bill lands somewhere else entirely, and almost nobody prices it in.
Who cashes in: