The American government is fighting for global supremacy of the United States in semiconductor production.

Armed with an up-to-date analysis of the domestic semiconductor industry, Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo is campaigning for Congress to grant $52 billion in subsidies for building new manufacturing facilities.

The cash injection is part of a bill to strengthen America's ability to innovate and compete, which provides for a total of $250 billion in subsidies.

Winand von Petersdorff-Campen

Economic correspondent in Washington.

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The Senate has already approved the draft with votes from both parties.

In the House of Representatives, Democrats have now submitted a draft that also contains the promotion of new factories, but also passages to promote the climate-friendly conversion of the American economy.

This upsets the Republicans and makes the fate of the entire support package uncertain.

Raimondo paints a bleak picture of the situation to underscore the need for financial aid.

Analysis by her ministry shows that as of 2019, companies that rely on semiconductors still had enough inventory to last 40 days of production.

Today, on the other hand, the supplies are just enough for 5 days.

Production as bottleneck number one

The authors of the analysis warn that inventories are even smaller in some key industries.

Even before the pandemic, there was a discrepancy between supply and demand.

The health crisis has intensified them.

While production was shaken by special events such as winter storms, factory fires, energy shortages or workforces suffering from coronavirus, demand continued to rise.

In addition, it has been postponed with high orders from the automotive industry and because of the construction of the 5G Internet infrastructure.

The Economics Ministry identifies insufficient production capacity as the number one bottleneck.

Because the Biden government also declares the shortage of semiconductors to be a national security risk, it sees subsidies for new factories as necessary and appropriate.

The Commerce Department report also shows that the industry has already responded to the shortage with investment commitments of $150 billion each last year and this year.

That is 30 percent more than in the record years.

The recently announced new Intel factory is taken into account, as is a new Global Foundries production facility in upstate New York.

President Joe Biden sees the semiconductor crisis as an opportunity to bring production back to America in order to make the country more independent of global turbulence and create new industrial jobs.

"America invented these chips," Biden said recently.

With domestic production, the White House is also pursuing geostrategic goals.

It is feared that China could eventually absorb Taiwan, the technology leader in chip production and development.