Secure enclaves: bad CHIPS Act idea wasting billions

While all the focus in the past week has been on a significant crisis for America’s once premier semiconductor company, Intel, which laid off 15% of its work force, hidden from view is another blunder – a $3.9 billion project to build a “secure enclave” semiconductor manufacturing facility. Intel will probably locate this facility in Arizona, where it already has a semiconductor fab.

If you are about to ask what will be produced at this facility, don’t bother since the project is classified. But even though the details are hidden, it isn’t hard to figure out what is going on and why it is a big mistake (like the CHIPS Act itself, a $59 billion dollar investment that will mostly finance foreign and domestically owned companies to set up facilities in the US). Because the CHIPS Act is a bipartisan waste of money, only the poor taxpayer will (once again) be robbed.

Some of the foreign companies financed under the CHIPS Act are: Samsung (Korea), TSMC (Taiwan), Global Foundries (UAE), BAE Systems (UK), Global Wafers (Taiwan) and Amcor (Australia). All these companies are awash in money, so the added US money is not needed.

The Secure Enclave project is based on a single intelligence report that, like the project itself, is classified. However, the gist of the intel-report is that an adversary could get into a semiconductor manufacturing plant (a fab) and somehow insert bad code into the chip manufacturing process, aka spyware.

There is absolutely no proof that any commercially produced chip has ever been compromised, but that didn’t stop the CIA from claiming something like this could happen. In effect, we are betting billions of dollars on poor intelligence with no empirical evidence to support it.