Moore's law is over. Nothing is going to restore that regular cadence of device shrink and performance increases. Each innovation is now a single tiny step in the endgame of scaling.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_second_law
It seems likely that we're relatively close to the point where it will no longer be economical to push the limits here. It's unlikely that even the entire world working together would want to spend more than $1T for a single fab, which Rock's law suggests is less than 20 years away.
It seems likely that we're relatively close to the point where it will no longer be economical to push the limits here. It's unlikely that even the entire world working together would want to spend more than $1T for a single fab, which Rock's law suggests is less than 20 years away.
Twenty years is a long time. I don't think people in 2025 could have predicted out needs for chips back in 2005.
If each company is worth $20 trillion in 20 years, they can easily raise $1 trillion together by selling some shares or using their shares as leverage or just straight up using their cash flow. I'm simplifying things by ignoring inflation, but you get the point.
The bottom line is, if capitalism thinks a $1 trillion fab will produce more than $1 trillion in value, it will happen.
Which is to say, if Rock's law continues to hold, it doesn't matter if some global consortium can pull together $1T for a new fab; can they pull together $2T four years later? And $4T four years after that? And $8T? $16T? To say that a doubling at this rate is sustainable is to suggest that you more than double the value at each step. At some point this can clearly not be the case, unless you want to posit a world where going from one process node to the next literally doubles the entire productive output of the human race.
Absent some unforeseeable technological breakthrough, at some point it has to slow down, either slowly, or drastically, or otherwise stop altogether. And for anyone who's currently middle age or younger, it's currently projected to happen in your lifetime.
TSMC has always had N2 on its roadmap long before the AI boom.