美国芯片行业市值蒸发1.5万亿美元 | 双语

《经济学人·商论》2022-11-28

The silicon squeeze

芯片困局

The silicon squeeze

美国芯片行业市值蒸发1.5万亿美元

The American chip industry’s $1.5trn meltdown

拜兴衰周期还有美国政府所赐

Thank the boom-and-bust cycle—and America’s government

在俄亥俄州利金县（Licking County）的一个工地上，一辆辆翻斗车和推土机正在装运泥土。这里正在建设的是英特尔投资约200亿美元的两座“晶圆厂”。今年3月，美国总统拜登在他的国情咨文中称这一大片工地为“梦想之地”。他语气庄重地说，这是“美国未来的根基”。

IN LICKING COUNTY, Ohio, fleets of dump trucks and bulldozers are shifting earth on the future site of chip factories. Intel is building two “fabs” there at a cost of around $20bn. In March President Joe Biden called this expanse of dirt a “field of dreams” in his state-of-the-union message. It was “the ground on which America’s future will be built”, he intoned.

今年春天，人们很难不对美国芯片制造商的未来心怀美梦。一场全球供应危机证明了芯片对现代生活的重要性。当时，对由芯片驱动的技术的需求仍在上升（如今大部分技术都要依靠芯片）。相比其他那些在股市中遭受重创的技术，投资者对芯片没有那么悲观。国会正在审议《芯片法案》，该法案承诺为英特尔在俄亥俄州的工厂这类项目提供520亿美元的补贴，以减少美国对外国晶圆厂的依赖。

In the spring it was easy to be dreamy about America’s chipmakers. A global supply crunch had proved how key chips were to modern life. Demand was still rising for chip-powered technology, which nowadays is most of it. Investors were less gloomy about chips than other tech, which was taking a stockmarket beating. The CHIPS act was moving through Congress, promising subsidies worth $52bn for projects like Intel’s in Ohio, in order to reduce America’s reliance on foreign fabs.

如今这些美梦似乎开始向噩梦演变。9月下旬，存储芯片制造商美光（Micron）公布的季度销售额同比下降20%。一周后，芯片设计公司AMD将自己第三季度的预计销售额下调了16%。据说英特尔计划裁员数千人，因为它一系列糟糕的业绩可能还会延续到10月27日发布最新季度报告的时候。它对自动驾驶部门的IPO估值原本为500亿美元，现在下调至只有这个数字的三分之一。自7月以来，美国大约30家最大的芯片公司的第三季度预期收入总额已从990亿美元下调至880亿美元。今年，在美国上市的芯片企业的总市值蒸发了超过1.5万亿美元（见图表）。

Today the dreams look nightmarish. In late September Micron, a maker of memory chips, reported a 20% year-on-year fall in quarterly sales. A week later AMD, a chip designer, slashed its sales estimate for the third quarter by 16%. Intel reportedly plans to lay off thousands of staff, following a string of poor results that are likely to continue when it presents its latest quarterly report on October 27th, and has just slashed the valuation of the initial public offering of its self-driving unit to a third of the $50bn it had originally envisaged. Since July America’s 30 or so biggest chip firms have together cut revenue forecasts for the third quarter from $99bn to $88bn. This year more than $1.5trn has been wiped from the combined market value of American-listed chip businesses (see chart).

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