Comment by gizajob
16 hours ago
Nvidia has a market cap of 4.5 trillion dollars and everyone is committing hundreds of billions to AI CapEx in their direction - they can afford to organise chip fabs if it really came to it. Ok TSMC and ASML would need to be on board but it could be done. Should be done in fact because even a simple SWOT analysis would show the risk to their business.
No amount of money is going to create a new fab in a reasonable timeframe.
You can buy one, if a suitable one exists, but there isn’t spare stock sitting around; the lead time is long, especially for high end nodes.
If Taiwan becomes practically inaccessible, is there any way another country can setup a competing fab (for the latest generation of chip sizes) without years of R&D? As far as I understand, the practical knowledge of how to do it doesn't exist right now. (Neither does the prerequisite tooling)
Given there’s fabs doing essentially the same thing elsewhere then yes. Getting down to 3nm and the technology and secrets that involves would take a while though.
TSMC can’t do it either without xUV lithography machines made by ASML in the Netherlands.
Furthermore there isn’t anything magical about about the current generation of chips that couldn’t be replicated at at a scale of 12 or 15 or 20 nanometers - it’s just that scaling down to that small allows for a greater density of transistors per wafer and thus increased power efficiency. An AI supercomputer could be built with chips with bigger transistors than 3nm it would just run hotter.
And investing in intel aside, one of Nvidias great competitive moats is CUDA and that’s software not hardware.
I meant specifically for a given small size. Sure larger ones can be and are produced elsewhere. But how many years behind is everyone else if they can't get any help at all from the current companies.
Aren’t the actual machines used in the fabs still made in Germany?
What is the risk for Nvidia if TSMC diseaper? Wouldn't they simply switch supplier and pick the second best option?
GPUs would go backwards a few generations for 5-10 years. Also supply shock on other industries would double the prices of chips for vehicles. Eg covid 3.0
Then they'd have to use Samsung or Intel. Both are a bit behind TSMC, but the main issue is that TSMC has a massive amount of capacity so chips would become very, very expensive.
That would not only be incredibly expensive, but there would be a period while quality catches up.