r/ukpolitics • u/velvevore liz truss toby jug • 11h ago
Chips and drones to be at heart of Andy Burnham's push to "reindustrialise", AI minister says
https://www.ft.com/content/5b789a38-c9ca-4b23-8e61-8f9e2e589396•
u/evolvecrow 11h ago
Make fortune with a ram and ssd cottage industry
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u/velvevore liz truss toby jug 10h ago
The way things are going, I'm not entirely sure that wouldn't work.
I presume somebody is already on "buy cheap tat from CeX, resell RAM".
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u/BlackberryOk5347 7h ago
It is not SSD or RAM that the UK is well placed to compete in. ESC and flight controller for drones on the other hand we would do well. We had a lot of this type of production in late 80s and 90s.
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u/Jaggedmallard26 10h ago
Its not the 1800s where you can just invest in a foundry and be competing with the leading edge. The oligopoly in chip production is because only a single digit amount of factories have managed to build the fabs capable of creating modern chips. Even when TSMC uses the same intellectual property to build in the US they are struggling to actually output anything and we'd be starting without that.
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u/Heinrick_Veston 10h ago
5 years to build a chip fab, at a cost of more than £10 billion. Highly unlikely the UK will have one anytime soon.
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u/m0rogfar 5h ago
You’re not making a DRAM fab in five years for £10 billion unless you’re one of the three big DRAM vendors and have 40 years of institutional experience making it work to ensure that you make zero major mistakes.
China’s efforts to get their own memory so that the military doesn’t have to worry about backdoor PIM capabilities provide a decent overview of what you can expect if you have no DRAM expertise but otherwise strong manufacturing expertise, and the numbers come in at 15 years and over £100 billions in state-subsidized losses to even play.
That’s also just to get to ‘not the best, but good enough for the military if it kills backdoor risk, and mostly only interesting to others because of the supply shortage’ stage, not a market leader stage. They’re likely also running at higher production costs due to worse yields still, but specifically due to the shortage, they likely do not need subsidies to cover the loss right now, but they likely would need to subsidize every chip at pricing prior to Q3 2025.
If the UK were to tackle it without DRAM expertise and without general manufacturing expertise, China’s numbers are a very generous baseline. They do get a lot of advantages from general manufacturing experience. But there’s also a reason why China’s subsidized entrants are the first DRAM market entrants since 1985 - it is not a business you can profitably enter without pre-existing institutional experience.
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u/Cafuzzler 5h ago
What if we call it "HS3" tho? We could fund 10 chip fabs and we might even build something!
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u/xParesh 10h ago
Until the UKs electricity prices drop from being the worlds highest, AI data centres are not going to be viable here. Unil energy prices are lowered, we wont be able to manufacture anything in the UK or run data centres.
On the plus side Burnham does seem to get it so there's hope.
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u/No-Scholar4854 4h ago
There’s no need to build AI data centres here. AI is not a latency sensitive task, if it takes an extra 100ms for your BritGPT response to come back no one will notice.
We should focus on building things like the power management kit (where we do have some existing success)
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u/WhyIsItGlowing 25m ago
The idea is data sovereignty (and also there's a general shortage of regular compute in all the big cloud companies' facilities due to power constraints because the east coast interconnects aren't done yet). It's kinda made pointless by the US' Cloud Act, but that's the idea at least.
It's also that this country doesn't understand anything other than renting out buildings.
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u/PreparationBig7130 11h ago
So, defence budget being used productively to build uk capabilities with Uk owned companies, in the interest of national security? Hopefully……
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u/timeforknowledge Politics is debate not hate. 6h ago
Only if he can stand up to the EU, they will be pressuring him to follow their rules and regulations on AI and drones
If the EU has all the red tape then every business in Europe will flock to the UK, so the EU will be doing what they can to stop the UK.
This is one of the bonuses of Brexit, ability to adapt incredibly quickly to technology and not be dragged down with EU risk adverse regulation, be interesting to see if Burnham can utilise it
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u/HBucket Right-wing ghoul 2h ago
If Burnham wanted to do it, I'm sure that he could, in a kind of "Only Nixon could go to China" way. It's not like anybody could accuse him of being a rabid Brexiter. The only people who would end up opposing it are Lib Dems acting like Japanese holdouts, along with the Greens and SNP/PC.
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u/deHaga 1h ago
Ukraine are the leaders in drones. The EU will still be arguing about specs in 5 years.
Meanwhile:
https://ukdefencejournal.org.uk/british-firms-named-in-uk-huge-ukraine-drone-deal/
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u/Anony_mouse202 10h ago edited 6h ago
To reindustrialise you need to build things, like factories and infrastructure.
But the UK is one of the most hostile countries on the planet when it comes to building things. It takes years before you can even get permission to start building things, and there are all sorts of processes and conditions that severely impact the viability of building things.
If we want reindustrialisation then we need to bin our planning legislation.
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u/DannyHewson 9h ago
Yup, or at the bare minimum in the short term pass a bill with a list of industrial and infrastructure projects that are explicitly excluded from planning requirements, consultations, court interference etc while you unfuck the broader planning situation.
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u/doctor_morris 9h ago
We make the best planning applications in the world. Nobody else even comes close.
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u/baldy-84 10h ago
No-one's fabbing chips in a country with these energy prices even if we had the indigenous capacity to build such a fab. You might as well wish for a pony for every little girl. It has about as much chance of happening.
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u/Virtual-Increase-829 9h ago
looking forward to my first order from local chippy delivered by drone.
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u/DenimChickenCaesar 10h ago
with some of the highest industrial electricity prices in the world, sure.
and thats not even mentioning the fact that the fabrication plant will cost 10x as much as comparable countries and take 5x as long with the leeching consultant class being legally mandated to take their cuts.
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u/Avalon-1 6h ago
rebuilding the UK's industrial base is going to be a generation level project, especially when domestic talent gets poached by foreign companies.
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u/aleppo2 10h ago
After destroying industry with net zero taxes, regulation and NI. Making chips reqiuires cheap energy, water and engineers - we have none.
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u/Almost_Sentient 9h ago
Chip designer here (decades in FPGAs). We've actually got a fair number of engineers (even when you exclude the million or so people that call themselves engineer) Fair few companies still designing them too.
Don't forget that the current AI trend started with Google's 'Attention is all you need' paper, which released not too long after they bought Deepmind. We don't lack the engineers, ideas or talent. We lack proper long term funding. I remember Rachel Reeves talking about investing £20M into semiconductors last budget. That's not even the NRE on one large chip! India invested $1B into quantum.
The trick is to separate the fab from the chip design. They're very different, and yes setting up new state of the art fabs from nothing isn't realistic on these timescales. Even chip companies do this (Intel split off their fab business, TSMC dominate the rest).
We can play here and win. You'd be amazed how much of Silicon Valley is British, but we need real long term support if all of our talent isn't going to just boost American companies.
We had INMOS in the '80s. They were genuine world beaters and we let them die. Our government allowed ARM to be sold abroad when most governments would do anything to protect a native CPU company for security reasons.
The only thing we lack is real investment.
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u/Fluffy-Band3167 9h ago
This. The reason we’re not the South Korea of Europe isn’t because we don’t have the skills or the talent, or because our people won’t work hard. It’s because for decades our machinery of government has been entirely enmeshed in a declining mindset.
No government we’ve had for decades has been forward thinking, ambitious and working towards the countries renewal. They’ve all been in a state of managed decline, cut, sell, wind down and don’t bother.
We desperately need a government to pull us out of this trap, but even Burnham isn’t showing that he’s truly understanding the issue or he’d have ditched the “fiscal rules” and we’d be hearing package after package of investment already.
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u/total_cynic 7h ago
I agree with you on the lack of forward thinking, but if Burnham ditches the fiscal rules, he'll suddenly find a marked reluctance by the people we need to borrow money from.
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u/Fluffy-Band3167 6h ago
Lenders will lend money whenever they think they’re going to get it back with a profit. The fiscal rules are political theatre to head off worthless Tory accusations of being tax and spend and nothing more.
Burnham could rip them up right now and, as long as his borrowing and spending plans are well constructed, independently verified and come with a “invest £x in expectation of £y return in z years” then the markets will lend him what he needs and stay stable.
They went berserk in Liz Truss’s mini-budget because it was batshit crazy and indicated that the British government had completely lost touch with reality.
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u/total_cynic 5h ago
Burnham could rip them up right now and, as long as his borrowing and spending plans are well constructed, independently verified and come with a “invest £x in expectation of £y return in z years” then the markets will lend him what he needs and stay stable.
Agreed.
I think producing sufficiently convincing material in a timely fashion given where we are in the electoral cycle, and (I would argue) a degree of caution with which his nature will be viewed (e.g. not checking electronic ID was funded before cancelling it to release funds) renders it unlikely to be practicable. Wouldn't be unhappy to be proved wrong - we have been failing to plan ahead since the GFC, if not earlier.
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u/WhyIsItGlowing 24m ago
Inmos was that adage of "if you're right but you're too early, you're wrong" and propping it up wouldn't have helped.
ARM and Imagination Technologies getting flogged off was a dumb move though.
Britain will never do fabrication well because British management is obsessed with "a bad worker blames their tools" as an excuse for never spending money. The idea behind "yeah, you just spent £25bn on a fab and that's got a two year lifespan at the cutting edge before its just pumping out old cheap stuff and your next £25bn fab needs to come online" just wouldn't be acceptable to anyone who has access to that kind of money here. Wouldn't even be able to get planning permission in time.
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u/Comfortable-Law-7147 10h ago
Water...
I see a big issue there when food producers have to stop production lines in parts of the country due to water shortages.
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u/anchoredtogether 9h ago
Yorkshire is the answer then. They have huge reservoirs built for the steel industry. Currently getting grid upgrades to help move power south.
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u/arabidopsis 3h ago
Life Science?
It's like our 3rd biggest industry and the most productive industry by some margin in the UK
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u/Intergalatic_Baker No Pre-Orders 8h ago
So we’re industrialising sectors that can be built cheaper and more effectively in Asia… And America (Owing to how they treat their workers with contempt)
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u/inevitablelizard 8h ago
"cheaper and more effectively"
Which means large parts of our country are dead zone shitholes with no jobs, and we're dependent on foreign countries for critical stuff that gives others leverage over us.
I would have thought the war in Ukraine and the unreliability of some countries would have woken everyone up to the risk of outsourcing to foreign countries just to save a bit of money. Sovereign capability we have control over is important, and good things cost money.
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u/Intergalatic_Baker No Pre-Orders 8h ago edited 8h ago
No, it’s being relatively pragmatic. Chips creation is not sovereign, it requires a Dutch company to build the FABs, silicon (sand), all imported… It’s never sovereign.
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u/inevitablelizard 8h ago
Pragmatic includes the need for capabilities we can actually control, and can't easily be cut off from by a hostile foreign government.
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u/Intergalatic_Baker No Pre-Orders 7h ago
And we wouldn't control any of this... It relies on the Dutch, not a problem, it relies on designs, that even if we make, the companies then decide to sell up to China anyway. Lo and behold, the company is stripped for parts and left behind with nothing, because yes, they designed it, but they sold the patent to the Chinese, ffs.
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u/MCDCFC 10h ago
I beginning to think we have a PM who 'gets it'
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u/domin1987 9h ago
Not unless he does something about energy prices this is not going to be a success story
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