The newer chip fabs, eg. TSMC N5, and upcoming N3 cost around $20 billion. This Italian plant is not for fab, but for dicing the wafers, packaging, etc. The ad

The newer chip fabs, eg. TSMC N5, and upcoming N3 cost around $20 billion. This Italian plant is not for fab, but for dicing the wafers, packaging, etc. The advanced fab processes used by Apple, Qualcomm, NVidea, Samsung, Intel (soon), and others rely on ASML's EUV (Extreme Ultra Violet) lithography (for fine lines in printing. Each succeeding process has more layers done with the EUV thus requires more of these machines and the cost is around $160 million each. A newer version, for processes such as Intel plans in having in production in 2025, costs about $330 million each. Again, many of these machines are needed for each wafer fab.