479: What Does the Senate’s $52 Billion Bill Mean For U.S. Microchip Manufacturing? (w/ Lewis Black)

On today's episode of The Brian Nichols Show, Lewis Black (CEO of Almonty Industries) returns to the program to discuss inflation, supply chain issues, and semiconductor shortage:

"The demand for semiconductors through the COVID lockdown was quite unexpected. Obviously, there was an enormous demand for consumer goods, phones, computers, so we put a huge sort of drag on the sector.

Then we couple that with increasing demand across the board, as we've reopened, we've got a lack of raw materials to actually produce them. And then, just to really put the icing on the cake, this push towards a greener future has put a dramatic effect on the supply chain for semiconductors.

So for instance, a normal regular gasoline vehicle has somewhere in the region of 800 to 1000 semiconductors. An EV has more than double that. So if you're looking to ultimately replace gasoline vehicles with EVs, you'll know where you're gonna need double the number of semiconductors to make that happen.

And this just doesn't exist - that capacity... that outputs - does not exist currently."