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    Silicon Valley Chosen for $4 Billion Chip Research Center

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    Anticipating federal subsidies, Applied Materials said it planned to invest up to $4 billion in the semiconductor project in Sunnyvale, Calif.Silicon Valley got its name from computer chips, but no longer plays a central role in shaping how they are made. A major supplier to the industry hopes to change that.Applied Materials, the biggest maker of machines for producing semiconductors, said on Monday that it planned to build a massive research facility near its hometown, Santa Clara, Calif., to allow chip makers and universities to collaborate on advances to make more powerful chips. Silicon Valley hasn’t seen a comparable semiconductor construction project in more than 30 years, industry analysts say.The company expects to invest up to $4 billion in the project over seven years, with a portion of that money coming from federal subsidies, while creating up to 2,000 engineering jobs.The plan is the latest in a string of chip-related projects spurred by the CHIPs Act, a $52 billion package of subsidies that Congress passed last year to reduce U.S. dependence on Asian factories for the critical components. What sets Applied Materials’ move apart is that it focuses on research, rather than manufacturing, and is a substantial new commitment to the industry’s original hub.Chip makers that grew up in Silicon Valley have long chosen to build new “fabs,” the sophisticated factories that fabricate chips from silicon wafers, in less costly states and countries. But Applied Materials is betting that technical talent at nearby universities and the local companies that design chips will spur innovation quickly, making up for cost differences with other locations.“You can connect more leaders in this ecosystem here than anyplace in the world,” said Gary Dickerson, the chief executive of Applied Materials. “There’s no place like this.”Applied Materials has scheduled an event on Monday in Sunnyvale, Calif., to discuss the project, with expected guests including Vice President Kamala Harris.Politicians from both parties overwhelmingly supported the CHIPs Act, partly out of fears that China will one day exert control over Taiwan and factories there that produce the most advanced chips. Besides encouraging domestic chip manufacturing, the legislation allocated about $11 billion to spur related research and development.Chip research now takes place in several phases in multiple locations, including university labs and collaborative centers such as the Albany NanoTech Complex in New York. Applied Materials participates with other companies in that center and operates a research fab in Silicon Valley where chip makers can work with its machines and those of other toolmakers.But many of the core chores in developing new production processes are carried out by chip manufacturers in fabs outfitted with a broad array of equipment. The proposed center, which Applied Materials calls Epic, is set to have ultraclean production space bigger than three football fields and is designed to give university researchers and other engineers comparable resources to experiment with new materials and techniques for creating advanced chips.One goal is to reduce the time it takes for new ideas to flow from the research labs to companies designing new manufacturing gear, information that is now often delayed as it is filtered through the chip makers.“The trouble is, those customers need time to figure out what they need,” said H.-S. Philip Wong, a Stanford professor of electrical engineering who was briefed on the company’s plans. “There is a big hole in there.”Applied Materials also said chip makers would be able to reserve space in the center and try out new tools before they were commercially available.The plan hinges partly on whether Applied Materials can win subsidies under the CHIPs Act, which the Commerce Department says has already attracted expressions of interest from more than 300 companies. Mr. Dickerson said that the company planned to build the center in any case, but that government funding could affect the project’s scale.Assuming the center evolves as planned, it could substantially bolster Silicon Valley’s role in the evolution of chips, said G. Dan Hutcheson, vice chair at the market research firm TechInsights.“It really is a vote of confidence for the Valley,” he said. More

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    Commerce Dept. Outlines Its Bid to Fund Cutting-Edge Chip Research

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    The Biden administration announced its strategy for the National Semiconductor Technology Center, a string of facilities aimed at propelling U.S. innovation.WASHINGTON — The Biden administration outlined plans on Tuesday to propel research on the type of cutting-edge microchips needed to power computers, cars and other devices, saying it would establish a new national organization with locations in various parts of the United States.The Commerce Department, which is in charge of the administration’s efforts to revitalize the American chip industry, said its new National Semiconductor Technology Center would bring together companies, universities and others to collaborate on next-generation chip technology. The organization would include a string of research centers, the locations of which have yet to be chosen, and aim to be operational by the end of this year.The organization would help “regain America’s leadership in research and development and technologies of the future, and importantly, make sure we stay there for decades to come,” Gina Raimondo, the commerce secretary, said in a briefing Monday.“It’s a place where industry and academia and start-ups and investors can come together to solve the biggest, grandest challenges and set priorities,” she added.The plans are part of the Biden administration’s effort to reinvigorate semiconductor manufacturing and ensure that the United States has a steady supply of chips necessary to feed its factories and support its national defense. The Commerce Department has been charged with doling out $50 billion to revitalize the industry, including $11 billion devoted to research and development.The technology center is expected to be central to that effort. Some of its locations would be capable of end-to-end manufacturing of new chip designs, while others would focus on experimenting with new materials and equipment, or with new ways of putting chips together to make them more powerful, Ms. Raimondo said.Laurie Giandomenico, the vice president and chief acceleration officer of MITRE, a nonprofit organization that operates federally funded research centers, called the $11 billion investment by the United States “pretty significant,” given that the semiconductor industry has in past years spent about $70 billion on research and development globally.The challenge, she said, would be to ensure that the money was spent to encourage collaborative research to solve the industry’s biggest problems, not the “siloed innovation” now carried out by chip firms that carefully guard their creations from competitors.“It should be on areas that no one company can solve alone,” she said.Companies, universities, lawmakers and local governments have been lobbying the administration to set up an outpost of the new organization in their area. Ms. Raimondo emphasized that the organization would be an independent “trusted” player, with board members appointed by a separate selection committee and strict controls for protecting intellectual property.One of the organization’s primary goals, Ms. Raimondo said, would be making it easier and less expensive for start-ups and other new entrants to develop and commercialize new chip technologies.“We want to cut in half the projected cost of moving a new chip from concept to commercialization over the next decade,” she said.Chris Miller, the author of “Chip War,” which chronicles the industry’s development, said it was comparatively easy for a researcher to develop a new idea for a chip in a laboratory. But given the high cost of producing chips, researchers can have a hard time getting their inventions manufactured.Designing an advanced chip, which may have tens of billions of transistors, can cost hundreds of millions of dollars, according to analysts. The latest systems for defining the smallest circuitry on wafers cost more than $100 million each, while the new factories called “fabs” that make advanced chips can cost $10 billion to $20 billion.“The big fabs are interested in producing 100 million chips for an iPhone, not 10 chips for a professor at M.I.T.,” Mr. Miller said.Venture capitalists also often shy away from investing in chip start-ups because they require more initial funding than other kinds of tech companies and more time to generate a return on that investment.To help address some of these issues, the government’s technology center will establish an investment fund to support start-ups, and provide manufacturing facilities for small players to experiment with new technologies.“I see a world where the U.S. can actually revitalize this microelectronics industry because we could bring down the costs of doing a chip start-up by a factor of five to a factor of ten,” said Gilman Louie, a tech investor and chief executive of a nonprofit investment organization called America’s Frontier Fund.The center’s research priorities are expected to be refined in the coming months. But the Commerce Department specified several areas it would focus on, including advancing the technology for analyzing the microscopic components of chips and setting technical standards for new kinds of chip packaging.As progress slows in squeezing ever-smaller transistors onto each piece of silicon, many companies are now breaking up big products into smaller “chiplets” that are placed side by side or stacked on top of one another.The Commerce Department said that setting new standards for these practices would pave the way for the creation of marketplaces in which companies can assemble new products using chiplets from multiple vendors. More

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    After a Burst of New Businesses, a Cooling Economy Intrudes

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    The pandemic has brought a boom in entrepreneurship, but higher interest rates, a chill in venture capital and fears of recession now pose obstacles.An unexpected result of the pandemic era has been a surge in entrepreneurial activity. Since 2020, applications to start new businesses have skyrocketed, reversing a decades-long slump.The reasons for the boom are manifold. Millions of people were suddenly laid off, giving them the time, and inclination, to start new businesses. Personal savings jumped, buoyed partly by a frothy stock market and government stimulus payments, providing would-be entrepreneurs with the means to fulfill their visions. Rock-bottom interest rates made money cheap and widely available.But the ebullient economic environment that helped foster this entrepreneurial spirit has given way to high inflation, rising interest rates and dwindling savings. That has left these nascent businesses to navigate challenging financial crosscurrents — and a possible recession — at a moment when they are at their most fragile. Even under normal conditions, roughly half of new businesses fail within five years.“Young businesses are inherently vulnerable,” said John Haltiwanger, an economist at the University of Maryland who studies entrepreneurship. “They’re likely to fail, and they are especially likely to fail in a recession.”In 2021, Americans filed applications to start 5.4 million new businesses, according to data from the Census Bureau. That was on top of the 4.4 million applications filed in 2020, which had been the highest by far in the more than 15 years the government had been keeping track. (Filings last year through November were running ahead of 2020 but behind 2021; figures for December will be released this week.)Data on actual business formation will not become available for several years, so it is not possible yet to measure the effects of the cooling economy on new ventures. Whether these new businesses pull through could have broad implications for the health and dynamism of the overall economy.“Innovation drives gains in productivity,” said John Dearie, president of the Center for American Entrepreneurship, an advocacy organization. “And innovation comes disproportionately from new businesses.”Jennifer Sutton started a juice and wellness bar in Park City, Utah. She is worried about the prospect of a recession and how it would affect the tourism that supports her business.Kim Raff for The New York TimesBut he cautioned that the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy — intended to tamp down the fastest price increases in decades — is “ramping up the headwinds facing entrepreneurs to gale force by crushing demand and by increasing the price of money.”In interviews, entrepreneurs expressed a mix of resolve and resignation about the months ahead. Some said they had learned lessons from the pandemic’s upheaval about how to endure financial adversity that they believed had recession-proofed their business models. Others were cleareyed about needing outside funding that they feared would no longer arrive.Inflation F.A.Q.Card 1 of 5What is inflation? More

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    The Long Road to Driverless Trucks

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    Self-driving eighteen-wheelers are now on highways in states like California and Texas. But there are still human “safety drivers” behind the wheel. What will it take to get them out?This article is part of our series on the Future of Transportation, which is exploring innovations and challenges that affect how we move about the world.In March, a self-driving eighteen-wheeler spent more than five straight days hauling goods between Dallas and Atlanta. Running around the clock, it traveled more than 6,300 miles, making four round trips and delivering eight loads of freight.The result of a partnership between Kodiak Robotics, a self-driving start-up, and U.S. Xpress, a traditional trucking company, this five-day drive demonstrated the enormous potential of autonomous trucks. A traditional truck, whose lone driver must stop and rest each day, would need more than 10 days to deliver the same freight.But the drive also showed that the technology is not yet ready to realize its potential. Each day, Kodiak rotated a new team of specialists into the cab of its truck, so that someone could take control of the vehicle if anything went wrong. These “safety drivers” grabbed the wheel multiple times.Tech start-ups like Kodiak have spent years building and testing self-driving trucks, and companies across the trucking industry are keen to reap the benefits. At a time when the global supply chain is struggling to deliver goods as efficiently as businesses and consumers now demand, autonomous trucks could alleviate bottlenecks and reduce costs.Now comes the most difficult stretch in this quest to automate freight delivery: getting these trucks on the road without anyone behind the wheel.Companies like Kodiak know the technology is a long way from the moment trucks can drive anywhere on their own. So they are looking for ways to deploy self-driving trucks solely on highways, whose long, uninterrupted stretches are easier to navigate than city streets teeming with stop-and-go traffic.“Highways are a more structured environment,” said Alex Rodrigues, chief executive of the self-driving-truck start-up Embark. “You know where every car is supposed to be going. They’re in lanes. They’re headed in the same direction.”Restricting these trucks to the highway also plays to their strengths. “The biggest problems for long-haul truckers are fatigue, distraction and boredom,” Mr. Rodrigues explained on a recent afternoon as one of his company’s trucks cruised down a highway in Northern California. “Robots don’t have a problem with any of that.”It’s a sound strategy, but even this will require years of additional development.Part of the challenge is technical. Though self-driving trucks can handle most of what happens on a highway — merging into traffic from an on-ramp, changing lanes, slowing for cars stopped on the shoulder — companies are still working to ensure they can respond to less common situations, like a sudden three-car pileup.As he continued down the highway, Mr. Rodrigues said his company has yet to perfect what he calls evasive maneuvers. “If there is an accident in the road right in front of the vehicle,” he explained, “it has to stop itself quickly.” For this and other reasons, most companies do not plan on removing safety drivers from their trucks until at least 2024. In many states, they will need explicit approval from regulators to do so.But deploying these trucks is also a logistical challenge — one that will require significant changes across the trucking industry.In shuttling goods between Dallas and Atlanta, Kodiak’s truck did not drive into either city. It drove to spots just off the highway where it could unload its cargo and refuel before making the return trip. Then traditional trucks picked up the cargo and drove “the last mile” or final leg of the delivery.In order to deploy autonomous trucks on a large scale, companies must first build a network of these “transfer hubs.” With an eye toward this future, Kodiak recently inked a partnership with Pilot, a company that operates traditional truck stops across the country. Today, these are places where truck drivers can shower and rest and grab a bite to eat. The hope is that they can also serve as transfer hubs for driverless trucks.“The industry can’t afford to build this kind of infrastructure from scratch,” said Kodiak’s chief executive, Don Burnette. “We have to find ways of working with the existing infrastructure.”They must also consider the impact on truck drivers: They aim to make long-haul drivers obsolete, but they will need more drivers for the short haul.Executives like Mr. Burnette and Mr. Rodrigues believe that drivers will happily move from one job to the other. The turnover rate among long-haul drivers is roughly 95 percent, meaning the average company replaces nearly its entire work force each year. It is a stressful, monotonous job that keeps people away from home for days on end. If they switch to city driving, they can work shorter hours and stay close to home.But a recent study from researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Michigan questions whether the transition will be as smooth as many expect. Truck drivers are typically paid by the mile. A shift to shorter trips, the study says, could slash the number of miles traveled and reduce wages.Certainly, some drivers fear they cannot make as much money driving solely in cities. Others are loath to give up their time on the highway.“There are many drivers like me,” said Cannon Bryan, a 28-year-old long-haul trucker from Texas. “I wasn’t born in the city. I wasn’t raised in the city. I hate city driving. I enjoy picking up a load in Dallas and driving to Grand Rapids, Mich.”Building and deploying self-driving trucks is far from easy. And it is enormously expensive — on the order of hundreds of millions of dollars a year. TuSimple, a self-driving truck company, has faced concerns that the technology is unsafe after federal regulators revealed that one of its trucks had been involved in an accident. Aurora, a self-driving technology company with a particularly impressive pedigree, is facing challenging market conditions and has floated the possibility of a sale to big names like Apple or Microsoft, according to a report from Bloomberg News.If these companies can indeed get drivers out of their vehicles, this raises new questions. How will driverless trucks handle roadside inspections? How will they set up the reflective triangles that warn other motorists when a truck has pulled to the shoulder? How will they deal with blown tires and repairs?Eventually, the industry will also embrace electric trucks powered by battery rather than fossil fuel, and this will raise still more questions for autonomous trucking. Where and how will the batteries get recharged? Won’t this prevent self-driving trucks from running 24 hours a day, as the industry has promised?“There are so many issues that in reality are far more complex than they might seem on paper,” said Steve Viscelli, an economic and political sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania who specializes in trucking. “Though the developers and their partners are putting a lot of effort into thinking this through, many of the questions about what needs to change cannot yet be answered. We are going to have to see what reality looks like.”Some solutions will be technical, others logistical. The start-up Embark plans to build a roaming work force of “guardians” who will locate trucks when things go wrong and call for repairs as needed.The good news for the labor market is that this technology will create jobs even as it removes them. And though experts say that more jobs will ultimately be lost than gained, this will not happen soon. Long-haul truckers will have years to prepare for a new life. Any rollout will be gradual.“Just when you think this technology is almost here,” said Tom Schmitt, the chief executive of Forward Air, a trucking company that just started a test with Kodiak’s self-driving trucks, “it is still five years away.” More

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    Biden Administration Releases Plan for $50 Billion Investment in Chips

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    The Commerce Department issued guidelines for companies angling to receive federal funding aimed at bolstering the domestic semiconductor industry.WASHINGTON — The Department of Commerce on Tuesday unveiled its plan for dispensing $50 billion aimed at building up the domestic semiconductor industry and countering China, in what is expected to be the biggest U.S. government effort in decades to shape a strategic industry.About $28 billion of the so-called CHIPS for America Fund is expected to go toward grants and loans to help build facilities for making, assembling and packaging some of the world’s more advanced chips.Another $10 billion will be devoted to expanding manufacturing for older generations of technology used in cars and communications technology, as well as specialty technologies and other industry suppliers, while $11 billion will go toward research and development initiatives related to the industry.The department is aiming to begin soliciting applications for the funding from companies no later than February, and it could begin disbursing money by next spring, Gina Raimondo, the secretary of commerce, said in an interview.The fund, which was approved by Congress in July, was created to encourage U.S. production of strategically important semiconductors and spur research and development into the next generation of chip technologies. The Biden administration says the investments will lessen dependence on a foreign supply chain that has become an urgent threat to the country’s national security.“This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, a once-in-a-generation opportunity, to secure our national security and revitalize American manufacturing and revitalize American innovation and research and development,” Ms. Raimondo said. “So, although we’re working with urgency, we have to get it right, and that’s why we are laying out the strategy now.”Trade experts have called the fund the most significant investment in industrial policy that the United States has made in at least 50 years.It will come at a pivotal moment for the semiconductor industry.Tensions between the United States and China are rising over Taiwan, the self-governing island that is the source of more than two-thirds of the most advanced semiconductors. Shortages of semiconductors have also helped to fuel inflation globally, by increasing delivery times and prices for electronics, appliances and cars.Semiconductors are crucial components in mobile phones, pacemakers and coffee makers, and they are also the key to advanced technologies like quantum computing, artificial intelligence and unmanned drones.With midterm elections fast approaching, the Biden administration is under pressure to demonstrate that it can use this funding wisely and lure manufacturing investments back to the United States. The Commerce Department is responsible for choosing which companies receive the money and monitoring their investments.In its strategy paper, the Commerce Department said that the United States remained the global leader in chip design, but that it had lost its leading edge in producing the world’s most advanced semiconductors. In the last few years, China has accounted for a substantial portion of newly built manufacturing, the paper said.The high cost of building the kind of complex facilities that manufacture semiconductors, called fabs, has pushed companies to separate their facilities for designing chips from those that manufacture them. Many leading companies, like Qualcomm, Nvidia and Apple, design chips in the United States, but they contract out their fabrication to foundries based in Asia, particularly in Taiwan. The system creates a risky source of dependence for the chips industry, the White House says.The department said the funding aimed to help offset the higher costs of building and operating facilities in the United States compared with other countries, and to encourage companies to build the larger type of fabs in the United States that are now more common in Asia. Domestic and foreign companies can apply for the funds, as long as they invest in projects in the United States.To receive the money, companies will need to demonstrate the long-term economic viability of their project, as well as “spillover benefits” for the communities they operate in, like investments in infrastructure and work force development, or their ability to attract suppliers and customers, the department said.Projects that involve economically disadvantaged individuals and businesses owned by minorities, veterans or women, or that are based in rural areas, will be prioritized, the department said. So will projects that help make the supply chain more secure by, for example, providing another production location for advanced chips that are manufactured in Taiwan. Companies are encouraged to demonstrate that they can obtain other sources of funding, including private capital and state and local investment.The Commerce Department is setting up two new offices housed under the National Institute of Standards and Technology to set up the programs.One of the department’s biggest challenges will be ensuring that the government funds add to, rather than displace, money that chip making companies were already planning to invest. Companies including GlobalFoundries, Micron, Qualcomm and Intel have announced plans to make major investments in U.S. facilities that may qualify for government funding.The chips bill specifies that companies that accept funding cannot make new, high-tech investments in China or other “countries of concern” for at least a decade, unless they are producing lower-tech “legacy chips” destined to serve only the local market.The Commerce Department said it would review and audit companies that receive the funding, and claw back funds from any company that violates the rules. The guidelines also forbid recipients from engaging in stock buybacks, so that taxpayer money doesn’t end up being used to reward a company’s investors.“We’re going to run a serious, competitive, transparent process,” Ms. Raimondo said. “We are negotiating for every nickel of taxpayer money.”In addition to the new prohibitions on investing in chip manufacturing facilities in China, officials in the Biden administration have agreed that the White House should take executive action to scrutinize outbound investment in other industries as well, Ms. Raimondo said.But she added that the administration was still working through the details of how to put such a policy in place.Earlier versions of the chips bill also proposed setting up a broader system to review investments that U.S. companies make abroad to prevent certain strategic technologies from being shared with U.S. adversaries. That provision, which would have applied to cutting-edge technologies beyond the chips sector, was stripped out of the bill, but officials in the Biden administration have been considering an executive order that would establish a similar review process.The United States has a review system for investments that foreign companies make in the United States, but not vice versa.The Biden administration has also taken steps to restrict the types of advanced semiconductors and equipment that can be exported out of the United States.In statements last week, Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices, both based in Silicon Valley, said they had been notified by the U.S. government that exports to China and Russia of certain high-end chips they produce for use in supercomputers and artificial intelligence were now restricted. These chips help power the kind of supercomputers that can be used in weapons development and intelligence gathering, including large-scale surveillance. Ms. Raimondo declined to discuss the export controls in detail but said the department was “constantly evaluating” its efforts, including how best to work with allies to deny China the equipment, software and tooling the country uses to enhance its semiconductor industry. More

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    Democrats Renew Push for Industrial Policy Bill Aimed at China

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    A major competitiveness bill passed the Senate last year with bipartisan support, only to stall. Democrats hope to revive it in the House, but first they will have to bridge big differences.WASHINGTON — Biden administration officials and Democrats in Congress are pushing to revive stalled legislation that would pour billions of dollars into scientific research and development and shore up domestic manufacturing, amid deep differences on Capitol Hill about the best way to counter China and confront persistent supply chain woes.House Democrats unveiled a 2,900-page bill on Tuesday evening that would authorize $45 billion in grants and loans to support supply chain resilience and American manufacturing, along with providing billions of dollars in new funding for scientific research. Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in a statement that she hoped lawmakers would quickly begin negotiations with the Senate, which passed its own version of the bill last June, to settle on compromise legislation that could be sent to President Biden for his signature.But the effort faces obstacles in Congress, where attempts to sink significant federal resources into scientific research and development to bolster competitiveness with China and combat a shortage of semiconductors have faltered. The Senate-passed measure fizzled last year amid ideological disputes with the House and a focus on efforts to pass Mr. Biden’s infrastructure and social policy bills. For months, the competitiveness measure was rarely even mentioned, except perhaps by Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, who has personally championed it.But facing a disruptive semiconductor shortage that has broken down supply chains and helped fuel inflation, Democrats are now vigorously pressing ahead on the bill. With Mr. Biden’s domestic agenda sputtering, the party is eager for a legislative victory, and top administration officials and lawmakers have said they hope to send a compromise bill to the president’s desk in a matter of months.“We have no time to waste in improving American competitiveness, strengthening our lead in global innovation and addressing supply chain challenges, including in the semiconductor industry,” Mr. Schumer said.Both the House bill and the one that passed the Senate last year would send a lifeline to the semiconductor industry during a global chip shortage that has shut auto plants and rippled through the economy. The bills would offer chip companies $52 billion in grants and subsidies with few restrictions.The measures would also pour billions more into scientific research and development pipelines in the United States, create grants and foster agreements between companies and research universities to encourage breakthroughs in new technologies, and establish new manufacturing jobs and apprenticeships.“The proposals laid out by the House and Senate represent the sort of transformational investments in our industrial base and research and development that helped power the United States to lead the global economy in the 20th century,” Mr. Biden said in a statement. “They’ll help bring manufacturing jobs back to the United States, and they’re squarely focused on easing the sort of supply chain bottlenecks like semiconductors that have led to higher prices for the middle class.”The semiconductor shortage has disrupted the economy, broken down supply chains and helped fuel inflation.Sarahbeth Maney/The New York TimesLawmakers will still need to overcome differing views in the House and Senate over how best to take on China and, perhaps more crucially, how to fund the nation’s scientific research.“There are disagreements, legitimate disagreements,” Gina Raimondo, the commerce secretary, said in an interview. “How do we do this? How do we get it right? There doesn’t seem to be much disagreement over the core $52 billion appropriation for chips. There is disagreement around how we make investments in research and development in basic science.”One major difference is that while the Senate bill invests heavily in specific fields of cutting-edge technology, such as artificial intelligence and quantum computing, the House bill places few stipulations on the new round of funding, other than to say that it should go toward fundamental research.In a memo on the legislation, House aides wrote that their measure was “focusing on solutions first, not tech buzzwords.”Some experts argue that approach lacks urgency. Stephen Ezell, the vice president for global innovation policy at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a policy group that receives funding from telecommunications and tech companies, called the House bill “not sufficient to enable the United States to win the advanced technology competition with China.” He argued that the focus on advanced technology in the Senate-passed bill would do more to increase American competitiveness.How the Supply Chain Crisis UnfoldedCard 1 of 9The pandemic sparked the problem. More

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    Economists Pin More Blame on Tech for Rising Inequality

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    Recent research underlines the central role that automation has played in widening disparities.Daron Acemoglu, an influential economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been making the case against what he describes as “excessive automation.”The economywide payoff of investing in machines and software has been stubbornly elusive. But he says the rising inequality resulting from those investments, and from the public policy that encourages them, is crystal clear.Half or more of the increasing gap in wages among American workers over the last 40 years is attributable to the automation of tasks formerly done by human workers, especially men without college degrees, according to some of his recent research.Globalization and the weakening of unions have played roles. “But the most important factor is automation,” Mr. Acemoglu said. And automation-fueled inequality is “not an act of God or nature,” he added. “It’s the result of choices corporations and we as a society have made about how to use technology.”Mr. Acemoglu, a wide-ranging scholar whose research makes him one of most cited economists in academic journals, is hardly the only prominent economist arguing that computerized machines and software, with a hand from policymakers, have contributed significantly to the yawning gaps in incomes in the United States. Their numbers are growing, and their voices add to the chorus of criticism surrounding the Silicon Valley giants and the unchecked advance of technology.Paul Romer, who won a Nobel in economic science for his work on technological innovation and economic growth, has expressed alarm at the runaway market power and influence of the big tech companies. “Economists taught: ‘It’s the market. There’s nothing we can do,’” he said in an interview last year. “That’s really just so wrong.”Anton Korinek, an economist at the University of Virginia, and Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel economist at Columbia University, have written a paper, “Steering Technological Progress,” which recommends steps from nudges for entrepreneurs to tax changes to pursue “labor-friendly innovations.”Erik Brynjolfsson, an economist at Stanford, is a technology optimist in general. But in an essay to be published this spring in Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he warns of “the Turing trap.” The phrase is a reference to the Turing test, named for Alan Turing, the English pioneer in artificial intelligence, in which the goal is for a computer program to engage in a dialogue so convincingly that it is indistinguishable from a human being.For decades, Mr. Brynjolfsson said, the Turing test — matching human performance — has been the guiding metaphor for technologists, businesspeople and policymakers in thinking about A.I. That leads to A.I. systems that are designed to replace workers rather than enhance their performance. “I think that’s a mistake,” he said.The concerns raised by these economists are getting more attention in Washington at a time when the giant tech companies are already being attacked on several fronts. Officials regularly criticize the companies for not doing enough to protect user privacy and say the companies amplify misinformation. State and federal lawsuits accuse Google and Facebook of violating antitrust laws, and Democrats are trying to rein in the market power of the industry’s biggest companies through new laws.Mr. Acemoglu testified in November before the House Select Committee on Economic Disparity and Fairness in Growth at a hearing on technological innovation, automation and the future of work. The committee, which got underway in June, will hold hearings and gather information for a year and report its findings and recommendations.Despite the partisan gridlock in Congress, Representative Jim Himes, a Connecticut Democrat and the chairman of the committee, is confident the committee can find common ground on some steps to help workers, like increased support for proven job-training programs.“There’s nothing partisan about economic disparity,” Mr. Himes said, referring to the harm to millions of American families regardless of their political views.Representative Jim Himes, who leads a panel on economic disparity, is confident it can find ways to help workers, like increased support for proven job-training programs.Samuel Corum for The New York TimesEconomists point to the postwar years, from 1950 to 1980, as a golden age when technology forged ahead and workers enjoyed rising incomes.But afterward, many workers started falling behind. There was a steady advance of crucial automating technologies — robots and computerized machines on factory floors, and specialized software in offices. To stay ahead, workers required new skills.Yet the technological shift evolved as growth in postsecondary education slowed and companies began spending less on training their workers. “When technology, education and training move together, you get shared prosperity,” said Lawrence Katz, a labor economist at Harvard. “Otherwise, you don’t.”Increasing international trade tended to encourage companies to adopt automation strategies. For example, companies worried by low-cost competition from Japan and later China invested in machines to replace workers.Today, the next wave of technology is artificial intelligence. And Mr. Acemoglu and others say it can be used mainly to assist workers, making them more productive, or to supplant them.Mr. Acemoglu, like some other economists, has altered his view of technology over time. In economic theory, technology is almost a magic ingredient that both increases the size of the economic pie and makes nations richer. He recalled working on a textbook more than a decade ago that included the standard theory. Shortly after, while doing further research, he had second thoughts.“It’s too restrictive a way of thinking,” he said. “I should have been more open-minded.”Mr. Acemoglu is no enemy of technology. Its innovations, he notes, are needed to address society’s biggest challenges, like climate change, and to deliver economic growth and rising living standards. His wife, Asuman Ozdaglar, is the head of the electrical engineering and computer science department at M.I.T.But as Mr. Acemoglu dug deeply into economic and demographic data, the displacement effects of technology became increasingly apparent. “They were greater than I assumed,” he said. “It’s made me less optimistic about the future.”Mr. Acemoglu’s estimate that half or more of the increasing gap in wages in recent decades stemmed from technology was published last year with his frequent collaborator, Pascual Restrepo, an economist at Boston University. The conclusion was based on an analysis of demographic and business data that details the declining share of economic output that goes to workers as wages and the increased spending on machinery and software.Mr. Acemoglu and Mr. Restrepo have published papers on the impact of robots and the adoption of “so-so technologies,” as well as the recent analysis of technology and inequality.So-so technologies replace workers but do not yield big gains in productivity. As examples, Mr. Acemoglu cites self-checkout kiosks in grocery stores and automated customer service over the phone.Today, he sees too much investment in such so-so technologies, which helps explain the sluggish productivity growth in the economy. By contrast, truly significant technologies create new jobs elsewhere, lifting employment and wages.The rise of the auto industry, for example, generated jobs in car dealerships, advertising, accounting and financial services.Market forces have produced technologies that help people do their work rather than replace them. In computing, the examples include databases, spreadsheets, search engines and digital assistants.But Mr. Acemoglu insists that a hands-off, free-market approach is a recipe for widening inequality, with all its attendant social ills. One important policy step, he recommends, is fair tax treatment for human labor. The tax rate on labor, including payroll and federal income tax, is 25 percent. After a series of tax breaks, the current rate on the costs of equipment and software is near zero.Well-designed education and training programs for the jobs of the future, Mr. Acemoglu said, are essential. But he also believes that technology development should be steered in a more “human-friendly direction.” He takes inspiration from the development of renewable energy over the last two decades, which has been helped by government research, production subsidies and social pressure on corporations to reduce carbon emissions.“We need to redirect technology so it works for people,” Mr. Acemoglu said, “not against them.” More

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    Even Your Allergist Is Now Investing in Start-Ups

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    The once-clubby world of start-up deal making known as “angel investing” has had an influx of new participants. It’s part of a wider boom in ever-riskier investments.SAN FRANCISCO — On a recent Wednesday evening, 60 people gathered in a virtual conference room to discuss start-up investments. Among them were a professional poker player from Arizona, an allergist in California and a kombucha maker from Tennessee. All were members of Angel Squad, a six-month $2,500 program that aims to help people break into the clubby world of venture capital as individual investors, known as “angels.”The group listened as Eric Bahn, the instructor, rattled off anecdotes and advice from the front lines of start-up investing. “The most important question when you are an early stage investor is: What happens if things go right?” he said, stepping back from his desk and raising his hands for emphasis.Caroline Howard, 29, one of the founders of Walker Brothers Beverage, a kombucha company in Nashville, said the class taught her how to evaluate deals. “I think it’s so fun to see companies when they’re so young and have a germ of an idea and back them,” she said.Founded in January, Angel Squad is one of several ways that people from outside Silicon Valley’s investing elite are now joining the ranks of angel investors. The influx — which includes art curators, dentists, influencers and retirees — is transforming the way that start-ups raise money, upending the pecking order in venture capital and pushing a niche corner of the investing world toward mass adoption.“It is absolutely going mainstream,” said Kingsley Advani, founder of Allocations, a tech platform for angel investors. “It’s accelerating and it’s getting faster and faster.” He said even his mother, a retired schoolteacher in Australia, has invested in 41 start-ups over the last few years.More than 3,000 new angel investors are projected to make their first deal this year, up from 2,725 last year, according to the research firm PitchBook. And the amount of money that angels are pouring into start-ups has swelled, reaching $2.1 billion in the first six months of this year, compared with $2.6 billion for all of 2020, according to the National Venture Capital Association and PitchBook.Until recently, such investing was off-limits to most people. Securities rules restricted it to the wealthy because of the level of risk involved, since most start-ups fail. Even those who qualified often lacked the connections to find deals. And start-ups preferred to raise big slugs of cash from a handful of investors, rather than deal with the costs and headaches of processing dozens of tiny checks.But over the last year, many of those roadblocks have dissipated. Last year, the Securities and Exchange Commission loosened restrictions and began allowing people to become accredited investors — those allowed to back private start-ups — after passing a test. New tech tools are making the process of raising funds from many small investors cheaper and faster. And start-ups have become eager to add potentially helpful angels to their rosters of backers.The boom is part of a rush into ever-riskier forms of investment, driven by low interest rates, stimulus money and a little bit of “why not?” chutzpah. Nowhere is that sentiment stronger than in the tech industry, where start-ups are flush with cash, initial public stock offerings have been plentiful and Big Tech is delivering blockbuster profits.“Overnight, the entire world just woke up and went, ‘Oh, wow, we want to go invest in technology,’” said Avlok Kohli, chief executive of AngelList Venture, a company that provides tools for start-up fund-raising.Many new angel investors have some connection to the tech industry but are not the V.I.P.s who are normally invited into deals. Some are complete outsiders. Many are broadcasting their activity on social media and turning the investing into a branding opportunity, a hobby, a networking play, a social status or a way to give back.Karin Dillie, 33, an executive at an e-commerce company in New York, said she hadn’t realized that she could be an angel investor. But in June, when a business school classmate emailed asking her to help fund a calendar app called Arrange, Ms. Dillie decided to go for it. She invested $5,000.“I probably needed someone to give me permission to play the game because investing always seemed so elusive,” she said.Karin Dillie, 33, an executive at an e-commerce company in New York, said she hadn’t realized that she could be an angel investor.Elianel Clinton for The New York TimesMs. Dillie has since joined several informal investing groups, listened to podcasts and set up news alerts for terms like “preseed funding” (the earliest money a start-up usually raises from outside investors). She said she was motivated to support female founders, who raise less than 2 percent of all venture funding.In London, Ivy Mukherjee, 28, a product designer, and Shashwat Shukla, 30, a private equity investor, also started putting money into start-ups together this year to learn new skills and network with others in the industry. They said they were proceeding cautiously, with checks of $2,000 to $5,000, knowing they could lose it all.“If we happen to make our money back, that’s good enough for us,” Mr. Shukla said.The new angels have the potential to transform a venture capital industry that has been stubbornly clubby. They could also put pressure on bad actors in the industry who get away with things ranging from rudeness to sexual harassment, said Elizabeth Yin, a general partner at Hustle Fund, a venture capital firm. The firm also created Angel Squad and shares deals with its members.“More competition brings about better behavior,” Ms. Yin said. (In addition to investing in start-ups, Hustle Fund sells mugs that say “Be Nice, Make Billions.”)The angel boom has, in turn, created a miniboom of companies that aim to streamline the investing process. Allocations, the start-up run by Mr. Advani, offers group deal making. Assure, another start-up, helps with the administrative work. Others, including Party Round and Sign and Wire, help angels with money transfers or work with start-ups to raise money from large groups of investors.AngelList, which has enabled such deals for over a decade, has steadily expanded its menu of options, including rolling funds (for people to subscribe to an angel investor’s deals) and roll-up vehicles (for start-ups to consolidate lots of small checks). Mr. Kohli said his company runs a “fund factory” that compresses a month of legal paperwork and wire transfers into the push of a button.Still, getting access to the next hot tech start-up as a total outsider takes time.Ashley Flucas, 35, a real estate lawyer in Palm Beach County, Fla., began investing in start-ups three years ago. She said it was a chance to create generational wealth, something underrepresented people did not typically get access to.“It’s the same people doing deals with each other and sharing in the wealth, and I’m thinking, how do I break into that?” said Ms. Flucas, who is Black.But it took cold emails, research, building her reputation on AngelList and participating in three angel investing fellowships to get access to deals and construct a portfolio of more than 200 companies, she said. Things especially took off this spring after she invested in several companies that had just graduated from Y Combinator, the start-up accelerator. Some of her investments have appreciated enough on paper to return more than she has put in.Now, Ms. Flucas said, she is getting asked to join venture firms or raise her own fund. “The seeds I planted at the beginning of the journey are bearing fruit,” she said.“It’s the same people doing deals with each other and sharing in the wealth, and I’m thinking, how do I break into that?” Ms. Flucas said.Ysa Pérez for The New York TimesSome longtime angels have cautionary words for those just beginning their start-up investments. Aaron Houghton, 40, an entrepreneur, said he lost $50,000 that he had invested in a friend’s start-up in 2014, along with a $10,000 deal that went belly-up. He sarcastically called the losses a “really nice, somewhat inexpensive wake-up call” that showed he needed to spend more than a few hours researching companies before investing.But that isn’t always an option in today’s frenzied market. Mr. Houghton said he had recently been given little more than a pitch presentation, a high price tag and a few hours to decide whether he was in or out of an investment.“It’s all so hot right now,” he said.In the recent Angel Squad class, one participant asked if investors should be concerned about valuations. Mr. Bahn said it was up to each investor, but he added that there was an upside to the skyrocketing prices. Some tech companies were becoming huge, worth $10 billion or more on paper, creating bigger returns for investors who got in early. That was the exciting thing about investing in young start-ups, he said.“The alpha,” he said, referring to an investor’s ability to beat the broader market, “just continues to grow.” More