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My 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
by nish__ 11mo ago
My 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 11mo agothat's 100% yield which ain't happening
- nish__ 11mo agoWhat would you expect yield to be?
- mindslight 11mo agoSounds like the kind of question ChatGPT would be good at answering...
- danparsonson 11mo agoWith no prior experience? 0%. Those machines are not just like printers :-)
- nish__ 11mo agoWe'll have to gain some experience then :)
- danparsonson 11mo 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!
- nish__ 11mo agoThank you. This is going to be way harder than I thought.
- vel0city 11mo agoEspecially when the plan is to just run them in a random rented commercial warehouse. I drive by a large fab most days of the week. A few breweries I like are down the street from a few small boutique fabs. I got to play with some experimental fab equipment in college. These aren't just some quickly thrown together spaces in any random warehouse. And it's also ignoring the water manufacturing process, and having the right supply chain to receive and handle these ultra clean discs without introducing lots of gunk into your space.
- danparsonson 11mo agoYeah good point, the clean room aspect of it is vital - when you're fabricating at the nano scale, a single speck of dust is a giant boulder ruining your lithography.
- warmwaffles 11mo agoNot with that attitude.
- nish__ 11mo agoMy man.
- warmwaffles 11mo agoA man can dream of no waste!
- shadowpho 11mo agoWhat about the $10b to build the facility (including clean air/water/chemicals/etc)?
- nish__ 11mo agoRent a warehouse.
- ghc 11mo agoIt would be cheaper to bulldoze the warehouse and start over.
- bigiain 11mo agoRent a warehouse in one of the non Han dominated areas of China, where you can use all you want from the city's drinking water supply and pump all your used chemicals into the nearby river. Make sure to totally automate your robotic production line so you don't need to employ any locals.
- shadowpho 11mo agoAnd then spend the next five years building the actual fab around it? Like what’s the plan here.
- nish__ 11mo agoNo you're right. My math is very off.
- acksponies 10mo agoYou should deactivate your bc donation link since you admitted this
- bluGill 11mo agoThe catch is if you started today with plenty of money (billions of dollars!) and could hire the right experts as you need them (this is a big if!) there would still be a couple years between today and producing 150 wafers per house. So the question isn't what does the math look like today, it is what the math looks like in 2 years - if you could answer that why didn't you start two years ago so you could get the current prices?
- q3k 11mo agoA photolithography machine doesn't etch anything (well, some EUV machines do it as an unwanted side effect because of plasma generation), it just patterns some resist material. Etching is happening elsewhere. Also, keep in mind, you'll need to do multiple passes through a photolithography machine to pattern different steps of the process - it's not a single pass thing.
- retube 11mo agoyeaaahhh.. these fabs don't just have a button that says "punch out a top of the line nvidia GPU"
- nish__ 11mo agoYou're right. I'm throwing away the napkin.