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PaperclipPerfector  14d ago (text post)   32176 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 7, 2025

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You could order all of the components from china (negligible bom and tariff besides the chip itself) and set up a factory with just a pick & place machine and reflow oven, and pump out 100 $30,000 gpus per hour. There's no reason we can't do this, we just don't do it because we never had a reason to.

But what does this actually accomplish? It isn't reducing our dependence on foreign chips in any way. All it does is introduce a middleman to increase prices.

You have to have someone do this step, why not do it in America? Whatever factory in China that does it currently just has a pick&place and reflow oven, and orders in all of the parts from suppliers.

If we built up a base of pcb assembly and local logistics of parts, this business could be done locally, capturing a lot of value add. Currently it's dominated by players like jlc pcb, and due to their ultra-low (possibly state subsidized) prices, nobody outside of China is even trying to play.

With pcba and appropriate design for manufacturing, you can dropship completely custom products (CYD, SAO etc...) simply by uploading the design.

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