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Comment by chx | Hacker News Reader

So 50B? That's nowhere near what you need. Last year both TSMC and Intel announced they are spending a hundred billion each on new fabs (TSMC in April, Intel in July) and they have all the R&D already and good relationship with ASML (and both own a few percent of it, too).

But the US banned ASML from selling to China so you need to catch up with ASML and Intel/TSMC at the same time. Now, I don't know when ASML started researching EUV but they were certainly working on it in 1998 -- which doesn't mean it'll take twenty years to replicate it because surely some of it is public but still, it's a big, big project. https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA56970339&sid=googleSc...

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Looks like ASML started planting the seeds of what eventually became EUV in the early 1990s.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28266708

Is Intel's & TSMC's spends comparable, though? They are both already executing at very high scale, so further investments need to be pretty huge to be worth it. A new upstart could likely start smaller. Not too small such that you can't develop any economies of scale, but significantly smaller than either Intel's or TSMC's planned operations.

why haven't alternatives emerged to ASML to help drive down the cost of building new fabs?

do you know what the cost breakdown is when building fabs?

The Youtube channel Asianometry has a great 18min video "China’s ASML is Years and Years Behind" analyzing the challenges of building fabs and lithography tools: https://youtu.be/DtOyW-JpJjM

The channel's older videos have a lot lot of information about fab economics, though I dunno if there's one that has a general cost breakdown.

I don't know about the whole fabs, but the machines that ASML makes are incredibly precise and powerful. They are built and stay in vacuum, so even shipping them costs millions. And the laser that powers them is room sized; it would probably make a decent weapon for a battleship too.

So I think the cost is largely that every part must be engineered to perfection.

Because the EUV machines that ASML build are the most complex machines ever built by humans and getting all the bits to work properly takes decades of R+D

e.g. watch this about the light source, its completely bonkers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Ge2RcvDlgw

And note also that all the software that is needed to engineer those things is also not allowed to be sold to China, so that is also another thing they have to replicate. And by the time you catch up on the decades of R&D and trade secrets needed to catch up with where the software is at now, everything has evolved even further ahead. Keeping pace with semiconductor technology is a never ending treadmill of constant innovation.

Source: my company is one of those not allowed to sell this type of software to China

Wasn't the atomic bomb the most complex machine ever built? Hanford alone had more than 50 000 people working towards it, at Oak Ridge the K-25 building was 1,640,000 square feet...

Although we could mention the B-29 which actually cost 50% more than the entire Manhattan Project -- or, to be closer to present day, the F-35.

Interesting question, maybe relative to the tech at the time it was. But in absolute terms I don't think anything comes close to 'hitting 25 micron molten drops of tin that are moving at 70 meters per second with two co-ordinated lasers in a vacuum 50,000 times a second'. And that's just the very first part of what the machine does.

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