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Comment by janmo | Hacker News Reader

> - Also in the thread, ASML has a monopoly on this tech. Others have not invested into EUV and by now, it's pretty much impossible for anybody to catch up.

Having basically the entire tech economy relying on one unique supplier is just insane. I hope their production facilities are very well protected and decentralised otherwise one natural disaster in the Netherlands or an Unabomber type terrorist attack and the semiconductor shortage we are facing now would be nothing compared to what would happen then.

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Except I'd imagine that most people won't feel the terrorist attack quite so quickly, giving folks likely enough time to recover. If they got bombed up, all the foundries would be fine and can continue production of chips as usual. Of course, the machinery need sophisticated maintenance and replacement parts, but most of those can be produced by non specialist equipment (like normal mills and lathes and stuff for all the mechanical structures). Zeiss plays a big part with the optics and stuff so that would mostly be covered as well.

There won't be any new foundries though. Moore's law would grind to a halt (moreso than it already has).

I think the key is that, the machines that make extremely advanced machines are not that advanced in of themselves.

You don't have to go down that many layers from the machines that foundries use (arguably objects among the very apex of human technology) to bog standard fabrication machines like lathes and mills and whatever they use to cast metal. We have lots of those around the world. It will definitely take a bit of time, but I don't think it will be all that utterly devastating.

Won't Netherlands be under water because of global warming?

Aren't they system integrator and get their supplies from thousands of vendors worldwide. That actually makes them disaster proof.

If so, I wonder how many (if any) of those vendors are single points of failures?

> Aren't they system integrator

But the tweets mentioned ASML bought suppliers with unique technology that no one else has

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