4 ms·
$20 billion for a new fab is a lot of money, even to Apple.
by xnx 10mo ago
$20 billion for a new fab is a lot of money, even to Apple.
- HardCodedBias 10mo agoIf it were only 20B then Apple would jump at the chance. As would almost innumerable others.
- JKCalhoun 10mo agoWell, if the future of your company depends on a fab, twice $20B is cheap.
- DetroitThrow 10mo agoCloser to $40b for a new fab for an established company to do it all correctly. It's a much more major investment to open a fab without ever doing it before, then continually use the brain power/institutional knowledge you've built up to stay near the forefront of fab tech, and then basically have weird incentives to build a foundry for only your products rather than the world at large. You're setting yourself up for making a huge part of your future revenue stream being set aside for ongoing chipfab capex and research engineering. And that's a huge gamble, since getting this all setup is not guaranteed to succeed.
- JKCalhoun 10mo agoIs that true? I guess what I mean is, is it $40B if you are trying to replicate the scale of a TSMC fab? Or could you do it for considerably less if the fab is initially designed to the needs of single customer (Apple)?
- DetroitThrow 10mo agoCloser to $40B for some of the latest fabs from TSMC you're seeing, yes. While there could be huge simplification in SoC and packaging processes if it was focused on a single product, Apple's needs will likely still be about having cutting edge processors, so it would still be pretty high even if they were to just buy TSMC.
- LunaSea 10mo agoApple has around $55B in cash, much more in stocks.