alt Hacker NewsA dozen or so well-resourced tech titans in China are no doubt asking themselves this same question right now.
Of course, it takes quite some time for a fab to go from an idea to mass production. Even in China. Expect prices to drop 2-3 years from now when all the new capacity comes online?
Replies
My napkin math:
According to my research, these machines can etch around 150 wafers per hour and each wafer can fit around 50 top-of-the-line GPUs. This means we can produce around 7500 AI chips per hour. Sell them for $1k a piece. That's $7.5 million per hour in revenue. Run the thing for 3 days and we recover costs.
I'm sure there's more involved but that sounds like a pretty good ROI to me.
I think it would be more like 5-7 years from now if they started breaking ground on new fabs today.
it's just a bunch of melted sand. How hard can it be?
China cannot buy ASML machines. All advanced semiconductor manufacturing in China is done with stockpiled ASML machines from before the ban.
At that point, it'll be the opposite problem as more capacity than demand will be available. These new fabs won't be able to pay for themselves. Every tic receives a tok.