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I mean, when LLMs go out of style, at least we’ll have a bunch of cheap gpus and components to buy when it inevitably floods the used market after the current generation get superseded, coupled with multiple chip fabs going online, it will eventually be raining chips.
About time someone put serious money into advanced fabs outside Taiwan, this is a smart play by TSMC to chase AI demand and hedge geopolitical risk. 3nm in Kumamoto is a big vote of confidence for Japan and a signal that the industry sees AI chips as where the margins are.
That said, don’t expect a flood of 3nm product overnight. Ramping 3nm in a brand new fab is brutally hard, yields take months if not years, and skilled fab workers and equipment are not plug-and-play. Bumping the budget to $17B and promising late 2027 is fine on paper, but the real work is the grind of volume ramp and supply chain readiness.
Also meh about the cheerleading from politicians. Sure, public support matters, but taxpayers deserve transparency on what they’re subsidizing. Overall I’m cautiously optimistic, but staying realistic: this helps diversify capacity, but it’s neither cheap nor quick.
why this dude got banned lmao ?
edit: ia bot apparently.
I thought fabs are bad agains earthquakes
There was a good LTT where he toured a new fab facility in Japan. Entire building(s) basically on giant shocks. It’s kind of mind blowing
This one will be designed to work during earthquake. Meaning that it won’t work without earthquakes
Is there anything that’s good against earthquakes?
Godzilla?
Mr. Godzilla, i would like one RAM please 🙏
Godzilla blesses you with a large dose of radiation.
Ahhhh, not what i was looking for! 🫠 Guess that’s what i get for asking a kaiju for PC components though 😅 I’ll have to remember this for next time
Living in the sky
with diamonds
They are. But Taiwan is prone to earthquakes as well and seem to handle them fine
Those fabs in Taiwan, even though they look like plain boxes from the outside, are really a wonder of human ingenuity. Each machine that’s sensitive to quakes is on a vibration isolation pedestal and that pedestal is seismically braced, from what I’ve read.
Not to mention every building in Taiwan is laced with explosives in case China ever attacks…
How come another East Asian country? Why does literally no other country want to make microchips?
Oh they want to… There are quite a few chip fabs around the world… there are very few that can manufacture at this size, along the bleeding edge of the numerous technologies necessary to do so.
Having the knowledge required to build the fab, the actual hardware required to manufacture them, and the skilled personnel to operate it all are hard to do. This is not something that you can toss together in a cave from scraps like Iron Man.
And a lot of that is by design with companies and governments trying to guarantee sovereignty by tightly controlling where these can be manufactured. The idea that enemies are less likely to try to take over/colonize a smaller country (like Taiwan) if the global chip manufacturing apparatus can be destroyed in minutes to prevent it from falling into enemy hands.
Another factor here is that to make the most advanced chips, you need something called eleven 9 silicon. That’s silicon that’s 99.999999999% pure.
We can only artificially manufacture up to nine 9 silicon.
Eleven 9 has to be mined, and there’s only one spot in the world were it exists. A little town in North Carolina.
That’s why the US gets to say who can even attempt to manufacture advanced chips.
Eleven 9 has to be mined, and there’s only one spot in the world were it exists. A little town in North Carolina.
What
Silicon wafer production just started with metallurgical grade quartzite and then chemically processed into high purity. The input material is usually around 98% purity.
