HN Reader

The counter point here is that the US and EU have benefited with a lot of economic growth in the past few decades. The fact that this growth effect has now run its course just means that things may need to change again and that old assumptions may need to re-evaluated. Which might include looking at strategies to re-shore.

Not because off shoring was a mistake 40-50 years ago; but because technology now enables automating a lot of the type of jobs that we off shored. I'm referring to robotics and and other innovations in manufacturing and assembly that reduces the amount of cheap labor needed and calls for higher skilled labor that the west can still provide.

The higher cost of skilled labor can be offset against the also substantial cost of shipping. A typical car from China costs between 1-2K $ to transport. And that's of course before tariffs. Also shipping is slow and building locally means faster delivery of custom orders, which is another thing enabled by modern manufacturing technology. There are many valid reasons to re-shore and re-thinking supply chains.

The Chinese are moving ahead applying the same kind of technologies in e.g. automotive than many other manufacturers with the exception of maybe relatively new companies like Tesla and Rivian that have embraced a software intensive approach to cars already. And that includes spinning up BYD plants on different continents. Compared to a BYD factory, GM and Ford look like they have a bit of catching up to do. Their lack of competitiveness on the international market has a lot to do with the fact that they failed to modernize their businesses. Also, they seem to be repeating their mistake of the nineteen eighties when the Japanese kicked their behinds with better cars and more modern manufacturing. Their reflex to blame the Japanese, Koreans, Chinese (or whomever) for their own failings is not a great one. It's going to yield the same result unless they change.

He is free to give back some of his $150bn anytime.

Can someone please fix the title? s/Jensen/Nvidia CEO/

As long as you have power structures in place in society where labor is weak and capital class is strong the capital class is going to use all their wealth and power to extract everything they can from the rest of the society.

Regardless of whether you bring or do not bring manufacturing back you also have to fix these socioeconomic issues before all can prosper.

What’s missing from these conversations are the cost of living.

We’ve financialized the housing market, meaning the very basic needs of shelter now rises in price in accordance to the market. If tech workers make 2x or 3x the median annual salary, it makes housing prices rise for everybody else in the city.

In order to pay a “living wage” employers have to pay enough for their workers to make rent and groceries. In america, one of the highest GDP per capita in the world, the “living wage” is somewhere between 3x to 10x the offshore salary.

If you could house millions of people at the bare minimum cost, if you could provide them food and healthcare at prices that aren’t inflated, then the living wage doesn’t need to be so high.

We talk a lot about raising the minimum wage. What about lowering the minimum costs? That would mean a less stressful life for workers and cheaper labor for employers.

Sadly, even the offshoring centers are losing to automation. I’ve personally seen even modest tools automate away 10s of jobs in a factory in the 2010s in India. Cutting, Punching, bending and moving metal sheets just done by 1 machine.

Today We have lights out manufacturing.

One thing I would highlight, is that the issue with offshoring wasn’t the loss of jobs as much as it was underemployment.

Going from factory foreman to burger flipper is what hollowed out that class of workers.

The Root cause failure for the offshoring model for the offshoring nation is retraining difficulty.

If people could be magically retrained into new roles, then offshoring would always work.

There are so many underlying changes to the established relationship between Labor and Capital in the US that would be a necessary part of keeping jobs here that it would effectively make us a completely different country.

For example -- suppose one could snap one's fingers and "bring back" millions of manufacturing jobs. What would lead one to conclude those would be the kind of "good jobs" everyone is envisioning? Historically, they were better jobs due to a strong labor movement, but that movement has been largely destroyed.

Similarly, if we want widespread prosperity, there is no reason service jobs should not be "good jobs." There is no economic rule that says that riveting should pay more than taking care of the elderly or food delivery.

We have jobs, we have just decided that the people working those jobs are not deserving of prosperity. If we re-shore jobs, what would make anyone think we would treat those jobs differently?

Ross Perot in 1992

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRr60nmDyu4

We have shipped millions of jobs overseas, and ... a strange situation, we have a process in Washington where after you serve for a while, you can cash in, become a foreign lobbyist.

We have got to stop sending jobs overseas.

You're paying 12, 13, 14 an hour for factory workers and you can move your factory South of the Border, pay a dollar an hour for your labor, have no health care. That's the most expensive single element making a car. Have no environmental controls, no pollution controls and no retirement and you don't care about anything but making money.

There will be a giant sucking sound going south.

He is not causally connecting "AI" with industry and manufacturing here. Building data centers isn't manufacturing. He says in this piece that energy production needs to come first, and manufacturing later and not the other way around. Is he saying that AI will require building out energy production and the increased energy production will be used for... manufacturing? But it'll be used for the data centers.

What, exactly, is the kind of manufacturing he's envisioning AI will bring? He's not saying. Is it perchance weapons systems? It's weapons isn't it[1].

That will only make sense if we go back in time a few decades and some assholes instigate more wars and global destabilization, because manufacturing weapons and stockpiling them is pretty pointless and resource ineffective otherwise. We know this from before.

Or is he saying chips? So is he against offshoring all chip manufacturing to TSMC? That's basically been a huge part of continued security guarantees (if you can call them that when they are unproven), and also he's Taiwanese isn't he? I don't get it.

Now, one of my errors here could be that I'm trying to make sense of the things Jensen Huang says, because he rambles incoherently quite a lot, after all, to such a degree I am not sure he's "entirely there".

[1]: https://www.war.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/4370464/se...

> The largest segment of the economy is manufacturing. And we’ve offshored that for too long. For 20 years. We got to bring that back.

Lie. The largest sector is Services at 70%. Besides, if it were the largest how can you also say it is offshored and needs to be brought back?

My grandfather worked in the aleganey forge running the tempering ovens for very large metal forgings. Raised a family,4 kids, kept the farm, retired and lived 30years more, and there was some money left for everybody. He bemoned the selling off?, out, of american manufacturing that began in the 1970's. He was the kind of american who was comfortably unaware of the rest of the world, perhaps ever so slightly embarassed by his unworldlyness, only having a high school educatiin, but also completly untroubled by anything, anywhere, ever bieng a real concern.He had worked on the 16" guns that are still to be seen on the decks of WWII battleships. But instead of an enduring world peace and prosperity he got to see the errosion of the american dream, and the desruction of americas strength from within. As a further illustration, granpa and grandma, used to go visit "uncle kieth"in NYC, St.marks place, 6th st, between 2nd and 3rd ave, manhatten, in the 70's ,80's and early 90's, stayed in the truck camper, parked on the street,an unspoken,unwritten imunity convieghed by that little bit of mud in the fender wells.

You cannot replicate the situation where the US was the workshop of the world at a time when other major industrial powers had been smashed by war...unless you try to smash them or encourage them to have a war....

Other countries develop and need less of the basic products that they can begin to make for themselves, they create trade blocs where they can begin to achieve scale greater than the US or they simply are bigger anyhow. If the US can substitute imports then so can they.

IMO the US has ridden the wave because that was the only sensible thing to do and it has stayed rich as a result. Adjustments may be needed - it's not safe to not be able to make fairly modern chips - but the whole world will get poorer if one splits it up and prevents scaling.

What to do now...well....

Everyone wants to give advice, no one wants to take a lead and execute anything concrete.

All the talk of energy and no mention of solar, wind, batteries

This doesn't make sense. Nvidia literally has offices all over the world including India (a country that gets the most flak for offshoring). So why now ? Suddenly, "offshoring bad" ? I don't buy it. I think it is more about AI data centers. I could be wrong.

Every country, or coalition of countries, need to have public manufacturing run by their respective governments where their main purpose is to raise the bar on product quality, r&d, and employee care.

Let the private sector battle it out in their race to the bottom on everything, but ensure there is an ethical and trustworthy alternative to create the necessary competition in the marketplace to secure progress, both technological and social, over stagnation and eventual necrosis.

This is part of that "national security" we hear so many go on about when defending their policies of hate.

There are three things that I think go underrated about America's manufacturing problems:

1. A lot of industries offshored simply because the owners of the facilities just sold and shipped off rare/expensive/important equipment to other countries without a second thought. Especially tool and die equipment. So a lot of industries in countries like Korea and China or India literally use the exact same equipment we used 80+ years ago. Even if we wanted these jobs back, the countries & businesses in question are too smart to ever sell the equipment back at nearly any price (why we can't manufacture them again is a whole other problem).

2. As Jensen alludes here, the cost of energy in the US dropped through the 60s but then flatlined. We became too dependent on fossil fuel and "comfortable enough" consumer prices. But the energy intensive heavy industry all moved to places with nuclear power or heavily subsidized power sectors.

3. The lack of any sort of public welfare solution is a distinctly American industrial policy failure. Manufacturing depends on labor force flexibility - both in finding the right people for jobs, as well as just dealing with stop-and-go or seasonal work. But Americans having their healthcare and retirement tied to their jobs and full employment is a huge boat anchor on both the workforce and industry.

Andrew Grove, in his later years, held the same view. He explained essentially everything we had seen till then and since: the decline of US semiconductor manufacturing, the loss of talent, critical dependence on foreign nations and companies, etc.

It turns out you can't cherry pick the intellectual work and fob the rest off on foreign supply and still maintain global leadership and domestic prosperity. The whole stack must be at least competitive domestically. Only trade policy can achieve this.

Outsourcing manufacturing was very short-sighted in light of the automation which was taking place and accelerating.

No doubt this short-sightedness was the result of our debt-based monetary system. The disconnection of money from long term value-creation created a cycle of speculative booms and busts which made short term bets the most viable strategy to ensure that execs would get their bonuses.

Also, the perverse legal concepts of 'corporate personhood' and 'limited liability' sealed our fate, ensuring that companies could pollute our land and water with chemicals... China was all too happy to send children's toys full of phthalates and other endocrine disruptors our way, ensuring that the next generation would be pacified and struggling with hormone-related issues (I leave you to infer cultural implications...)

Seems like China got their revenge for the Opium wars!

This ship has sailed. Economy will not revert back to what it was with wishful thinking. Especially offshoring jobs is the utmost goal of every CEO, even if the wage is one dollar less. This benefits himself and his customers giving no f... for the unemployed.

China is living its 1990's this decade: the boom is starting to wear off. Next comes India which is living its 50's. Next will come Nigeria which is in it's 20's. Offshoring jobs will continue until the end of modern civilisation.

Remind me where does NVIDIA assemble their cards?

That's all well and good, but he is literally at this moment attempting to export industrial capacity to China at a direct tradeoff to it's availability to the US, even when he could sell it at the same price.

Makes sense. There is no real functional difference though between offshoring a job, or importing cheap (H1B or other) labour to do it in the home country.

Tell me a reason why would billionaries help others when you have full automation?

Globalism was also a big factor in world peace overall.

And in other news ... water is wet.

Do we (or someone better informed) understand the impact of re-shoring ?

In my mind, the reason (or the original intent) for off-shoring was to reduce costs to be able to sell more X (because cheaper is easier to sell) and selling more X means more profit and better market capitalisation (if the company selling X was public)

If re-shoring is adopted, my assumption/understanding is that X will retail at a higher price. Oversimplification maybe, but higher retail price means lower sales means lower profit (means lower stock price if the company selling X was public)

The solution to that would be higher/more automation i.e. less (or minimal) manufacturing related jobs I think ?

And now the situation would be that while there was capital-return-to-shore happening but went into automation and the jobs recovery was not what someone would have expected (both in terms of scale and skill)

But because the jobs were virtually re-shored the off shore labour market now suffers ?

Thoughts... ?

the us is 16% of global manufacturing by value with 4% of the population, i dont know how this fact isn't brought up more.

on a population weighted basis the us manufactures more by value than china.

A bunch of people salivating for a world where the us was 52% of world gdp, not because it was great, but because the rest of the world was ash.

This is self serving nonsense. “ai infrastructure” here isn’t manufacturing its enormous data centers that have so few humans the lights are off in every area other than where physical maintenance is happening. It’s about building enormous caverns that consume enormous amounts of power and warehouse the products his company manufactures offshore. The only thing he wants to onshore is spending on those offshore made products he sells. There’s no meaningful jobs in “AI infra” that outlive for the original data center build. He’s advocating for huge investment in energy production to ensure there’s capacity to run his products he’s selling that his company produces off shore.

How can anyone read this with a straight face?

Could a company other than Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company manufacture the chips that Nvidia products are made of, and could that happen in America? The answer is yes to both. But if Nvidia attempted it today, it would be doomed. Jensen knows that sometimes it's more convenient to be Jen-Hsun.

If maximizing profits is the primary thing that matters (and in the US, amongst other places, it is) then nothing will change about this. It's also why unions are so opposed by certain groups and it's why we have such an obscene wealth imbalance. Shareholders and profits matter more than people.

Martin Luther King Jr. expressed it well when he said, "when machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered,"

There’s a huge downside to manufacturing and that is pollution.

IMO, I’d rather china be the economic super power and the US leeching off that technological progress and manufacturing the same way say Scandinavia or most of Europe currently does.

Those Europeans get 2 months off while china and the US duke it out and they get all the technological benefits with no downsides. It’s genius.

Everyone talks about the US being number one, but no one wants to put in the effort. You all want to sacrifice work life balance and give up those remote jobs to push the US back to the top? Thats what it takes.

I think people are ignoring the reciprocity in the global trading system.

People and news articles always talk about goods trade deficits for rich countries, but never their almost universal services trade surpluses, and the profit margins are vastly different.

For manufacturing, a large part of the revenue goes to materials costs, but for services, almost all of it are net incomes.

Yes you can bring back manufacturing jobs, but your services surpluses would also shrink, because when you don't open your market, countries were not obligated to let you reap profits there too.

The political dance of NVIDIA:

1. Offshore jobs, maximize profits and take advantage of incentives to offshore. 2. Political winds shift. 3. Talk a good game about needing to onshore, make some token moves to move a small token amount of manufacturing back to the US. (You are here). 4. Once the admin changes and/or mid terms, continue to spend more on offshoring.

Founder of American AI company believes AI infrastructure should be built in America.

Let's see what the United States Secretary of Commerce has to say regarding onshore manufacturing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNUXedYX7aE&t=17s

I’m sure Jensen Huang is diligently thinking about serving his country every day.

> In a recent speech, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang outlined his plan for bringing manufacturing jobs back to America: force companies to build AI infrastructure in America.

Not self-serving at all.

> Since founding Nvidia in 1993, he has overseen its transformation into a central supplier of computing platforms for AI, data centers, and high-performance systems. That position provides direct exposure to the industrial requirements behind digital innovation, including power generation, fabrication capacity, and workforce availability. From this vantage point, energy is the basis of the economy from which everything is built.

This reads just like AI slop: I am applying for a government advisor position. Can you please write me a short paragraph linking the work experience listed in my resume with the position?

Remind me where Nvidia’s products have been built, basically forever?

No kidding. We need to abolish the H-1B too. What a disgrace that is.

The children yearn for the data centers

You exploited underpaid labor or the globe for the benefit of yourself and American customer. Minority of Americans are workers, but all are customers. You did well.

Jensen wants power and resources for his data centers big news

“We?”… how insulting.

I’ve noticed again and again what’s missing from the often repeated by media blame game of “they’re taking our jobs” is the fact that it was US corporations purposefully offshoring in the name of maximising profits at the expense of paying US wages locally, rather than countries “stealing” the jobs ffs! It’s. Pure. Xenophobic. Deflection. FFS!

“They’re stealing our jobs!”. No… corporate America applied the Ferengi Rules of Aquisition #6 to whole industries for a quick buck.

Traditionally, economy are typically divided into three sectors: Agriculture, industry, and services. Service industry contains everything from nursing to software development and sales. The problem with this division is that there is an extreme productivity gap within work in the service industry. A software developer's work can serve 100 million people at a time, when a nurse can only serve one customer at one specific time.

The reason why highly developed economies have become so service driven is because they have become sort of bimodal: The cost of labor is such that only jobs that are productive enough (profitability per hour) are done in these countries, and jobs that absolutely have to be done there to sustain the population. Jobs in the middle, everything that is not highly profitable or location-dependent, is offshored to lower-cost countries due to the cost of labor. This results in these developed countries having issues: Cost of living is high due to labor cost and there's high economic inequality due to wildly differing productivity.

The solution would be to bring these "mid-productivity" jobs back to developed countries. However, the main roadblocks still remain: The cost of labor is too expensive for most of these jobs to be competitive globally. However, I think there might be a way to do this in the near future: Advancements in robotics would mean a higher level of automation for industrial work, meaning more industrial jobs would become viable in high-cost countries. Each worker would be productive enough that the cost of labor is not critical anymore.

To make this happen, I believe it's important to ensure that the country is viable for this kind of manufacturing: Energy supply needs to be abundant and cheap, workforce needs to be educated, outside the "elite" students, and there needs to be low trade barriers. Low trade barriers are needed, because virtually all manufacturing is part of a global supply chain where parts cross many borders before the product is sold (and (high-value) products are sold globally). Additionally, the viability of automation will vary between different parts of the supply chain, and so you likely cannot automate everything.

> not just those with PhDs and college degrees.

Don’t worry, soon they’ll earn as much as those without PhDs and college degrees thanks to LLM overlords. What an absolute clown.

Please let me put a data center in your back yard. Please just one more I promise the chat bots will help you email faster please bro AGI is just around the corner I promise it wont be an exponential multiplier on wealth concentration.

I used to agree with this (at least the headline), but then I lived through the Biden administration.

Fundamentally Americans want to consume more services and especially goods than the people living in America produce. The only ways to square that circle are

1. To get more people. But by 2024 prime age labor force participation was at essentially record numbers[0] so there aren't more people available domestically, and we saw in the election that swing voters are not fans of mass unskilled immigration.

2. To produce more with the same people (i.e. increase productivity). But in most cases this is up to technological advancement and not in the hands of policymakers. There are probably some sectors that could benefit from deregulation (e.g. construction) but those regulations have their own constituencies that don't want to see them go.

3. To force people to consume less (i.e. inflation). Voters hate this.

4. To import more from abroad.

In the end "offshoring" is the only politically viable option.

[0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060

Offshore the datacenters (no jobs). Keep any manufacturing (some jobs). Problem solved.

Is he going into politics or something…

People love the abundance of cheap affordable stuff more than they love their neighbors having work.

It's also a positive feedback loop, where the less money people have from a lack of good jobs, the more they will choose cheap foreign goods to buy. Never mind that if you are in an economically productive sector, this whole cheap shit bonanza is just pure upside for you (with a touch of dissonance to maintain moral purity, of course).

Bringing jobs "back" probably isn't going to do much. We need a cultural shift away from Temu, Shine, Amazon, Walmart, Dollar General and towards spending more money for less goods.

Which is going to be about as popular as proposing we go back to land lines.

Hmm Could Jensen's statement be motivated that by forcing companies to build AI infrastructure would ensure more of his Nvidia AI chips to be sold? I keep seeing him say things that makes him appear bias towards more sales. Like dismissing any possibility that an AI bubble is growing. To admit the possibility may hurt sales.

Kiss the ring. The only way to keep the line going up is government money.

Easiest way to do it is to financially and legally cut off all avenues to offshore and outsource.

Then make it litigative open season for any affected or displaced person to court mandate a near-blank check to make up for the generational contempt of US citizens.

I always ask who the "we" is in statements like this? Is it self critique or just a way of saying we are all at fault you better don't focus on me.

Who is "we"? Jensen, where are your chips made? You're part of the problem.

The $US as world's reserve currency played a big part in why manufacturing was offshored. As manufacturing processes mature they move to the periphery. Because of the reserve currency status of the $US, this periphery meant outside the United States.

The periphery got the jobs and the US Elite got the $$$'s. What should've happened though was the Elites should've invested their cash into in technologies. Sure they did to some extent (NVIDIA is an example) but mostly what they did was pile their money into fixed assets, hence the inflation (e.g. housing) we have today.

The Blame lies with the Investment class elites, the Bankers, and the Donor Controlled politicians. Washington D.C. (Donor Controlled).

So fucking just go ahead and make your own foundry then, go ahead and make an EUV machine instead of buying one from ASML, get slave wage Americans to assemble chips and boards, better ban foreign developers abroad and domestically because they might send those pennies you give them back home.

Just another billionaire.

"Corporate welfare recipients that got free money to build data centers, testing the water on asking for more free money to hire employees."

The cycle repeats: send jobs somewhere else, hold those jobs hostage until the government pays you to bring them home. It will take the form of tax holiday on bringing foreign cash home, etc.

STFU Jensen, why don't you stop making circular deals and build a Fab with the 5 trillion dollars that you have - rather than having TSMC and Samsung make them?

Put your money where your mouth is!

Onshoring manufacturing and bringing back the US manufacturing base is a critical issue. This is from a social and security pov. Having millions of young men wallowing around playing video games and drugs all day and not working, raising families, is disgusting and a sign of collapse. We need manufacturing back in a big way, unfortunately I don't think that Trump, despite also thinking that, has the vision or ability to make it happen.

Nobody could see that coming! /s

"If only we could find the people responsible for this" - American CEOs

lol

"AI" is going to coincidentally collapse the same time this tyrannical presidency ends

what drugs are you doing where you truly believe eliminating millions of jobs is going to bring "prosperity"

it's going to "silo" wealth even further and make everything more unaffordable

next generation won't even be able to own a car forget a home

Similar things can be said about LLMs replacing jobs. I'm all for governments regulating such changes, but at best they can only slow things down.

But that said, there is a balance to be had. Ultimately, quality of goods and services, and the competitiveness of the country as a whole must take priority. Not jobs. The whole idea of creating jobs for the sake of creating jobs is perverse. It doesn't help anyone and harms the public in the long term. If we want a way to give people income, UBI or similar welfare-like approaches make sense. They might even be more profitable in the long-run.

With offshoring, has the quality of software gone up or down? If it has gone down, then these companies are harming the country. If they can improve quality by offshoring, then so be it. That only means whatever we're doing isn't working in terms of generating quality software, and we need to fix that. But I think it is a bit more nuanced, offshoring to certain countries tends to have higher quality than others, so that should be taken into account.

My wish is that we all (not just the US) go back to the 50's and 60's space-race era mindset of competitive innovation. I think (and I hope it isn't too controversial to say) that culturally we've been abandoning nationalism and nationalistic-pride, these were the drivers back then. Whether it was Nazi germans, USSR scientists, NASA scientists, bell labs,etc.. there was a strong sense of country/nation and that our work was contributing to that, that something we're building as a collective that will be our legacy to be passed on to the next generation.

The offshoring and general enshittification culture today is not that. It's Reaganism turned pandemic. The only thing that matters it the thickness of the shareholder's wallet. What I expect from governments is to take a bi-partisan approach to this, we need some sort of nationalistic pride to get us back on track. With EU for example, I can see a sense of European identity and choesion being formed now that the US is turning more and more hostile towards the EU. In the cold-war era, we had russia to unite us. Now, we're more concerned about other americans in the US than we are about China or Russia, our sense of partisan/sub-culture identity is much stronger than the national identity, there is no expectation or pressure from the government or the public for companies to work in the best interests of the country. At best we expect them to be proxies for welfare programs.

In other words, whether it is LLMs or offshoring, we should expect them to not do that because the alternative is better. The educated workforce in the US is not looking good,it's pretty dismal. Even the population attending college has gone down dramatically. Companies like TSMC struggle big time when trying to open plants in the US because there is no talent here. From what I hear from teachers all over, the post-covid situation is very scary, it is perhaps more concerning than anything else for the future sustainability of the US as a country.

I agree that we've done a great disservice to the country by offshoring, but only in part, only in cases where the quality of the work was poor. For example,I reckon (and i could be wrong) there are more developers and with better talent per-capita (not by volume) in certain western-european countries than the US. Even in India, for a long time there was this bias that outsourced talent there is of lesser quality, but over the decades I thing things have improved - but you do get what you pay for. My point is, coupled with this sentiment should be how we've also done a great disservice to the country by screwing up education, government and a several other things. It isn't just offshoring, there is a more fundamental mindset that is corrosive and must be addressed.

Maybe he doesn’t like to be the next Maduro dragged out of bed at night by marines. So he complies to everything Trump wants him to say?