Several U.S. chipmakers are calling on the Biden administration to provide subsidies and tax incentives to support domestic semiconductor manufacturing, according to a recent Reuters report.

Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, and Micron all signed onto a letter penned by the Semiconductor Industry Association, a Washington D.C.-based lobbyist group that has previously called for $37 billion in aid for U.S. chip fabs. The letter comes amid a global semiconductor shortage that has hobbled automakers and caused long delays for consumer goods including Microsoft and Sony’s hotly anticipated game consoles.

In response, a bipartisan group of lawmakers have pushed for the Biden administration to enact the National Defense Authorization Act to bolster semiconductor capacity. However, analysts point out that while propping up domestic fabs may help to shore up national security concerns, it probably won’t address automakers needs in time.

Most chipmakers, including three of the four companies that have signed onto the letter, outsource some or all of their manufacturing to companies like Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) and Samsung Electronics. Intel and Micron are two of the few chipmakers still fabricating their own chips, let alone doing so domestically. Intel does outsource some production to TSMC.

“Building a wafer fab is a hideously expensive, time consuming, painful process, and a lot of companies said we’re not going to do that, we’re just going to outsource that,” said Glenn O’Donnell, VP and research director of infrastructure and operations at Forrester Research, in an interview with SDxCentral earlier this week.

What's more, both TSMC and Samsung — which produce at least some chips for Intel, Qualcomm, and AMD — have already announced plans to build chip fabs in Arizona and Texas, respectively. These facilities are expected to start coming online in 2023.

In related news, Bloomberg reports Google, Microsoft, and Qualcomm are complaining to U.S. antitrust regulators over Nvidia’s $40 billion bid to acquire British chip designer Arm Holdings from SoftBank.

The deal, which was announced in September 2020, will see Nvidia become Arm's parent company. However, the GPU maker claims Arm will remain headquartered in the United Kingdom and maintain its customer neutrality.

According to Bloomberg, Google, Microsoft, and Qualcomm are concerned the the deal will harm competition in the semiconductor space. Nvidia is a major producer of GPUs, networking technologies, and, if the acquisition of Arm is allowed to move forward, CPU architectures.

Rather than produce its own chips, Arm designs and licenses instruction set architecture and core designs to chipmakers like Qualcomm and Apple.

Bloomberg reports that there is a real concern that if Nvidia owns Arms, it could limit rivals’ access to these technologies or could raise prices.

Nvidia is also expected to face barriers on similar grounds in China. Following months of trade restrictions surrounding semiconductor licensing, there are concerns that if Nvidia — a U.S. owned company — were to acquire Arm, Chinese chipmakers may lose access to the architecture and core designs.