alt Hacker NewsASML only makes a certain number of machines a year that can do extreme ultra-violet lithography.
Also - turbine blades limit power, according to Elon.
Between them - we cannot chip fabs past a certain rate, and we cannot stand up the datacenter to run these desired chips past a certain rate. Different people believe one or the other is the 'true' current bottleneck. The turbine supply chain scaling looks much more tractable -- EUV is essentially the most complicated production process humans have ever devised.
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Presumably ASML can increase production if demand is high enough the question is over what time frame. 5 years seems plausible to me but I honestly don't know what that number is.
If only there were some form of cheap, widely manufactured power generation technology that didn't use turbines... Are they really going to wait until 2030 to get more turbines rather than invest in solar?
Is ASML really the bottleneck? Do you believe anybody but TSMC and few fabs could really use and acquire those machines? I don't know the throughput of a EUV device from ASML but I imagine you need :
- clean room, itself needing the infrastructure for it (size, airCo, filtering, electricity) and the staff to run and maintain that basically empty space - wafers to "print" on, so that's a lot of water and logistic to manipulate them (so infrastructure for clean water and all chemicals) also with dedicated staff - finally staff who would be able to design something significantly better than NVIDIA, Intel, Broadcom, IBM, etc while (and arguably that's the trickiest part IMHO) being able to get it good enough as at a scale that can be manufactured from their own fab.
so I'm wondering who can afford this kind of setup that can only then make use of ASML machines.