sylver_dragon

Do you really want Musk starting a game console company?

It’s a dick move, but I can kinda understand why SpaceX would make it. There has been a push to “de-risk” supply chains, after the disruptions caused by Covid, Russia’s invasion of Ukranie, and other world events. This type of de-risking was partly responsible for the CHIPS and Science Act. The US Government has a strategic incentive to have a stable and resilient supply chain for semiconductors.

For SpaceX, having critical components be only available from fabs in Taiwan is a risk to business. China has been more and more vocal about it’s desire to annex Taiwan. With Trump taking office, one can imagine that the US commitment to protect Taiwan may not be quite as iron clad as it has been in the past. It’s not hard to imagine a future where China launches an invasion of Taiwan and the US does little more than shrug. At that point, any business which is solely reliant on Taiwan for semiconductors is going to see major disruptions.

So ya, it’s a complete dick move. But, I suspect SpaceX will be far from the last company looking to build a supply chain outside Taiwan.

Some employees have accused Dell of trying to shrink its workforce with this policy

There’s the real goal. Cut headcount without directly cutting headcount. Of course, the headcount which bails first will be the highest performers with the greatest ability to find other employment. But, that won’t show up on the bottom line for a few years.

Have you considered just beige boxing a server yourself? My home server is a mini-ITX board from Asus running a Core i5, 32GB of RAM and a stack of SATA HDDs all stuffed in a smaller case. Nothing fancy, just hardware picked to fulfill my needs.

Limiting yourself to bespoke systems means limiting yourself to what someone else wanted to build. The main downside to building it yourself is ensuring hardware comparability with the OS/software you want to run. If you are willing to take that on, you can tailor your server to just what you want.