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At the centre Chips are getting more expensive mainly because they take more process steps, not because the tools got dearer. Holds DODoug O'Laughlin Read this korrent →

• Similar wording The chip industry split into fabless designers and a handful of foundries because fabs got too expensive to own, not because anyone chose that structure. Holds BPBrian Potter
• Similar wording The same law that made chips cheaper made the factories that produce them enormously more expensive. Holds BPBrian Potter
• Similar wording Chips made on older process nodes have to get more expensive, because a new fab cannot make money selling at prices a fully depreciated fab set. No longer holds DODoug O'Laughlin
• Similar wording Hundreds of billions of dollars of AI value rest on about a billion dollars of lithography tooling that cannot be scaled quickly. Holds DPDylan Patel
• Similar wording The reason we cannot simply make more memory is that there is nowhere to put the tools, and a fab takes two years to build. Holds DPDylan Patel
• Similar wording Chipmakers are consolidating into a few strategically important firms, so a fab is now a geopolitical asset rather than an industrial one. Holds DODoug O'Laughlin
• Similar wording The business is not building a great chip; it is accelerating an algorithm domain. Holds JHJensen Huang
• Similar wording A semiconductor fab costs what it costs because it is a mass-production factory that has to hold atomic precision around the clock. Holds BPBrian Potter