The newly formed Semiconductors in America Coalition, which
also includes Amazon's Amazon Web Services, said Tuesday it has asked US
lawmakers to provide funding for the CHIPS for America Act, for which President
Joe Biden has asked Congress to provide $50 billion.
"Robust funding of the CHIPS Act would help America
build the additional capacity necessary to have more resilient supply chains to
ensure critical technologies will be there when we need them," the group
said in a letter to Democratic and Republican leaders in both houses of the US
Congress.
A global chip shortage has hit automakers hard, with Ford
Motor saying it could halve second-quarter production.
Automotive industry groups have pressed the Biden
administration to secure chip supply for car factories. But Reuters last week
reported administration officials were reluctant to use a national security law
to redirect computer chips to automakers because doing so could hurt other
industries.
The new coalition includes some of those other
chip-consuming industries, with members such as AT&T, Cisco Systems, General
Electric, Hewlett Packard, and Verizon. It cautioned against government actions
to favour a single industry such as automakers.
"Government should refrain from intervening as industry
works to correct the current supply-demand imbalance causing the shortage,"
the group said.
Tech companies such as Apple are also being hit by the chip
shortage, but far less severely than automakers.
The iPhone maker said last month it will lose $3 billion to
$4 billion in sales in the current quarter ending in June because of the chip
shortage, but that equates to just a few percent of the $72.9 billion in sales
analyst expect for Apple's fiscal third quarter, according to Refinitiv revenue
estimates.
© Reuters
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