alt Hacker NewsI tend to agree with you, feels to me like the root of this is essentially whether foundries will "go all in" on AI like the rest of the S&P 500. But why trade away one trillion-dollar customer for another trillion-dollar customer if the first one is never going away, and the second one might?
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alt227 • yesterday at 6:28 PM
Why are foundries going 'All In' on AI? They fab chips for customers, doesnt matter what chips they are and who the customer is.'Who will pay the most for us to make their chips first' is the only question TMSC will be asking. The market of the customer is irrelevant.
I think it is less of a trade and more of a symbiotic capital cycle, if I can call it that?
Nvidia's willingness to pay exorbitant prices for early 2nm wafers subsidizes the R&D and the brutal yield-learning curve for the entire node. But you can't run a sustainable gigafab solely on GPUs...the defect density math is too punishing. You need a high-volume, smaller-die customer (Apple) to come in 18 months later, soak up the remaining 90% of capacity and amortize that depreciation schedule over a decade.