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A dozen or so well-resourced tech titans in China are no doubt asking themselves this same question right now. Of course, it takes quite some time for a fab to
by Reason077 10mo ago
A dozen or so well-resourced tech titans in China are no doubt asking themselves this same question right now.
Of course, it takes quite some time for a fab to go from an idea to mass production. Even in China. Expect prices to drop 2-3 years from now when all the new capacity comes online?
- dylan604 10mo agoAt that point, it'll be the opposite problem as more capacity than demand will be available. These new fabs won't be able to pay for themselves. Every tic receives a tok.
- School-Cotton 10mo agoChina cannot buy ASML machines. All advanced semiconductor manufacturing in China is done with stockpiled ASML machines from before the ban.
- phil21 10mo agoWould you really need ASML machines to do DDR5 RAM? Honest question, but I figured there was competition for the non-bleeding edge - perhaps naively so.
- squigz 10mo agoAs someone who knows next to nothing about this space, why can China not build their own machines? Is ASML the only company making those machines? If so, why? Is it a matter of patents, or is the knowledge required for this so specialized only they've built it up?
- nish__ 10mo agoYes. ASML is the only company making these machines. And both, they own thousands of patents and are also the only ones with the institutional knowledge required to build them anyway.
- baq 10mo agoI thought Fermi paradox is about nukes; I increasingly think it's about chips
- bluGill 10mo agoThey can - if they are willing to invest a a lot of money over several years. The US got Nuclear bombs in a few years during WWII with this thinking, and China (or anyone else) could too. This problem might be harder than a bomb, but the point remains, all it takes is a willingness to invest. Of course the problem is we don't see what would be missed by doing this investment. If you put extra people into solving this problem that means less people curing cancer or whatever. (China has a lot of people, but not unlimited)
- School-Cotton 10mo agoDesigning such an advanced lithography machine is probably a Manhattan Project scale task. China is indeed trying to make progress and they will probably get there someday but for now ASML is the only company in the world that knows how to build these or anything remotely close.
- astrange 10mo agoASML is not the only sole supplier involved. There's a few more layers of them you have to replace.
- School-Cotton 10mo agoRight, the most famous example is Zeiss which is the only company in the world that builds the high-precision mirrors needed for the most advanced ASML machines. I’m not sure if those are subject to export bans too, but even if they are, I think China could eventually figure out how to build them. It’s just a matter of a huge amount of R&D that would need to be done first.
- tooltalk 10mo agoThat restriction is only for the most advanced systems. According to ASML's Q3 2025 filing, 42% of all system sales went to China. SK Hynix also has significant memory manufacturing presence in China; or about 40% of the company's entire DRAM capacity.
- UncleOxidant 10mo agoI think it would be more like 5-7 years from now if they started breaking ground on new fabs today.
- nish__ 10mo agoMy napkin math: According to my research, these machines can etch around 150 wafers per hour and each wafer can fit around 50 top-of-the-line GPUs. This means we can produce around 7500 AI chips per hour. Sell them for $1k a piece. That's $7.5 million per hour in revenue. Run the thing for 3 days and we recover costs. I'm sure there's more involved but that sounds like a pretty good ROI to me.
- Keyframe 10mo agothat's 100% yield which ain't happening
- nish__ 10mo agoWhat would you expect yield to be?
- mindslight 10mo agoSounds like the kind of question ChatGPT would be good at answering...
- danparsonson 10mo agoWith no prior experience? 0%. Those machines are not just like printers :-)
- nish__ 10mo agoWe'll have to gain some experience then :)
- danparsonson 10mo agoSure - once you have dozens of engineers and 5 years under your belt you'll be good to go! This will get you started: https://youtu.be/B2482h_TNwg https://youtu.be/B2482h_TNwg Keep in mind that every wafer makes multiple trips around the fab, and on each trip it visits multiple machines. Broadly, one trip lays down one layer, and you may need 80-100 layers (although I guess DRAM will be fewer). Each layer must be aligned to nanometer precision with previous layers, otherwise the wafer is junk. Then as others have said, once you finish the wafer, you still need to slice it, test the dies, and then package them. Plus all the other stuff.... You'll need billions in investment, not millions - good luck!
- Keyframe 10mo agoit's just a bunch of melted sand. How hard can it be?