I believe Intel has a winner with the upcoming Crescent Island GPUs with up to 480GB of LPDDR5 memory.
A lot of SMEs will need local AI with large open weights models (i.e. >1.5TB of VRAM), but they don't need a watercooled 8x Nvidia GB300 box. Besides, it's difficult to deploy and very expensive.
Crescent island is air cooled and likely fast enough for a group of users running something like GLM 5.2 or Kimi K3.
gigatexal 6 hours ago [-]
I thought Nvidia after they invested in Intel killed Intel’s GPU efforts as it could be a threat to Nvidia’s GPUs
kyrra 4 hours ago [-]
My general take is all of The GPU design efforts are going toward Enterprise / datacenter graphics cards. They are just skipping a generation or two of consumer.
minraws 6 hours ago [-]
To Nvidia the biggest threat is a capex cut from big tech not another company in the same domain, maybe some Chinese companies but people aren't going to be moving off of Nvidia for large deployments in the short term even if some TPU/Tranium etc is used it's not close to Nvidia.
I have no explanation other than people, researchers are comfortable with it and don't want to switch.
throwway120385 2 hours ago [-]
Nvidia's software support remains "best in class" so they've become the default for a lot of this stuff. To overcome that I think you'd have to get a lot of hobbyists and by extension interested young people using your hardware instead of Nvidia. So you'd have to have good software support, decent hardware, and low hardware cost. People started with Nvidia because most machines had an Nvidia card in them, and Nvidia's software support was carried-over momentum from how they've supported their GPUs with PC gaming. I've tried AMD, for example, and the compatibility matrices and bugs and just general lacking software support for ML on their hardware makes it a total non-starter. It may be a lot better with current-generation stuff but it's going to take a lot for me to trust AMD for ML.
dismalaf 2 hours ago [-]
A 4% stake doesn't even make Nvidia one of the top 3 holders of Intel stock... They'd be crucified for changing strategy for a 4% stake.
Also Nvidia arguably needs Intel more than vice versa, Intel now has SOTA fabs on the newest EUV technology, TSMC is at max capacity and they need to fight Apple and others for allocation...
3 hours ago [-]
tancop 4 hours ago [-]
[dead]
rando1234 8 hours ago [-]
Amazing looking machine! $380 million a pop. Must surely be one of the most sophisticated machines humanity has ever built? A great achievement of European science and technology (ducks).
petcat 6 hours ago [-]
> A great achievement of European science and technology
It's an amazing piece of technology but this is... wildly wrong. ASML is a multi-national company that licenses IP largely from USA and Japan, but also Taiwan and Germany. The actual EUV light source is developed and produced in California by Cymer, which ASML acquired in 2013. But ASML was only permitted to acquire the company under a strict technology sharing and export control agreement with the US government. Additionally, a huge portion of the photolithography research is directly developed (and owned) by US companies and research organizations such as IBM, Albany NanoTech, and SEMATECH.
There is a reason why ASML's next-generation research photolithography machine is currently being installed and developed in upstate New York, and not somewhere in the Netherlands. The same reason that Cymer is still in San Diego instead of being relocated to Europe. Because it's American technology.
> There is a reason why ASML's next-generation research photolithography machine is currently being installed and developed in upstate New York, and not somewhere in the Netherlands.
This is a wildly ignorant comment. The R&D lab in NY State if anything is an effort to copy IMEC, the world's leading research organization when it comes to semiconductor R&D. They essentially set and define the roadmap for node advancements and then the industry follows by actually implementing their innovations at scale in their fabs. I guess they are technically not in the Netherlands, being located about 50 miles south of the Dutch border in Belgium. And they have in fact have an EXE system of their own, and have had access to ASML's high-na tools since before they were even commercially available
Lucasoato 6 hours ago [-]
> There is a reason why ASML's next-generation research photolithography machine is currently being installed and developed in upstate New York, and not somewhere in the Netherlands. The same reason that Cymer is still in San Diego instead of being relocated to Europe.
Why is the Netherlands government even allowing this?
grumbelbart2 6 hours ago [-]
The supply chain both in parts for their machines, but also in terms of research and technology for new machines is very deep and very international. If the US states that a technology can only be used by ASML if they keep R&D in the US, then there is no easy alternative for ASML.
That is true not only for ASML, but for the semiconductor industry in general. The number of smaller, specialized companies for certain tools, chemicals and software is staggering. And they sit all over the US, Europe, Japan, Taiwan and Korea.
arjie 5 hours ago [-]
The entire multinational effort is in US-Europe-E.Asian countries which are a coordinated allied bloc. The Netherlands allows it because they are entirely aligned.
Strong mutual defense agreements cover four out of the five crucial countries here (NATO, Anpo, MDT US/ROK) and the last (Taiwan) has arms sales assurances.
It’s not like these are strongly opposed nations or anything. Part of the same fleet in some sense.
Zigurd 4 hours ago [-]
2023 called...
hunterpayne 32 minutes ago [-]
Russia invaded in 2022, Trump was elected in late 2024 and took office in 2025. The out of context quote that kicked all this off was in 2017 or 2018. Somehow you picked the one year out of the last 10 or so that didn't matter for any of this.
The really wild thing about this whole narrative is how unlikely this entire sequence of events was. Let's review:
1) Trump gives some rambling answer to an Estonian journalist in 2017 (or 2018) in which he says about 4 different things, all of which conflict with each other.
2) That journalist clips the answer to make it sound like Trump wants to leave NATO.
3) European leaders lose their mind and for the first time in 35 years actually up their military spending. Something that every US president since Bush Sr has made a major foreign policy goal that ever single administration failed at.
4) So completely by mistake, a journalist nobody has ever heard of, handed Trump the biggest foreign policy win for any US president since Bush Sr.
5) Russia invades Ukraine
6) Sweden and Finland join NATO
7) Trump wins the 2024 election and cuts off some of the Ukrainian aid (but not intelligence sharing).
8) The removal of US limitations on Ukraine allows them to strike Russian oil infrastructure.
9) Russia can no longer afford to fund their war in the way they had been.
10) Ukraine is now actually winning.
So somehow, Trump has gotten a huge foreign policy win and helped turn around the war in Ukraine completely by accident. Its like watching a cow talk.
toast0 2 hours ago [-]
Can't undo a 2013 tech sharing agreement because you got a call in 2023...
Zigurd 2 hours ago [-]
Technically NATO is much harder to undo, and yet there we go.
toast0 1 hours ago [-]
It's much easier to discontinue military (and other) cooperation than it is to unshare knowledge.
vlovich123 3 hours ago [-]
Because ASML acquired the US company that created this tech and the agreement for allowing Netherlands to do so was that the tech and know how remain in the US.
shrubble 4 hours ago [-]
The EUV lithography process and other pieces that comprise what ASML sells was developed with US government funding, and it remains encumbered by that. The US government thus has veto power over the tech, and thus over ASML.
saidnooneever 5 hours ago [-]
if they dont allow it ASML will move away and they have nothing.
llm_nerd 5 hours ago [-]
> The actual EUV light source is developed and produced in California by Cymer, which ASML acquired in 2013.
Cymer was one of multiple vendors (Gigaphoton, XTREME) providing this sort of light source, and ASML acquired it because it couldn't achieve what they wanted (they needed 100+W and Cymer could only achieve 15W). ASML needed to control and fund the company, and add engineering talent, to achieve what they actually needed.
Oh and ASML bought Cymer because Gigaphoton (another company at basically the same stage of development as Cymer), being a Japanese company, objected to foreign control. Though if ASML knew the protectionist, insular direction the US was going to go they probably would rethink their past decisions.
So this retconning that Cymer is really the secret magic of ASML and the Netherlands is just stealing US ingenuity is hilarious stuff.
And for that matter, it is amazing how so often we hear about "American" tech that is actually overwhelmingly combining acquisitions and manpower from abroad. Like is an iPhone an "American" creation? LOL, no.
petcat 5 hours ago [-]
> the secret magic of ASML and the Netherlands is just stealing US ingenuity is hilarious stuff.
I never said anything about ASML stealing technology or ingenuity. The point is that EUV photolithography is an international effort. The machines don't exist at all without about 6 different countries contributing technology and expertise.
ASML has certainly proven itself to be a very capable integrator of many international technologies and processes.
saberience 4 hours ago [-]
Most of those technologies being European, including the most difficult to make components in the system.
Why isn't there an American company doing this? Why isn't an American company making the lasers, mirrors, metrology, vacuum handling tech, etc?
tonyhart7 3 hours ago [-]
they are licensed to European company yes
reason why US didn't produce most of these component because US gov didn't continue investment so privately owned enterprise take over from there namely ASML
that also reason why US can restrict EUV sales to china
bijowo1676 4 hours ago [-]
isnt DUV and EUV technologies discovered and developed by US national labs (LLNL, LBNL, Sandia) in cooperation with EUV Consortsium funded by US Chipmakers (Intel, AMD, Motorola) and licenced to Cymer?
llm_nerd 3 hours ago [-]
EUV was "invented" (demonstrated) in Japan first, though those US labs did a lot of work on the overall lithography system and reflective optics to put it into practice. The US DOE along with the manufacturers made a consortium (EUV LLC consortium) to commercialize/scale that Japanese technology because they could obviously see the promise, and Cymer is a member, as was ASML already via SVG.
Simultaneously Japan created its own initiative (EUVA), and Gigaphoton didn't rely upon the US initiative at all. And again in an alternate universe -- one where Japan isn't protectionist and Cymer wasn't out of financial runway and desperate -- we'd be talking about how ASML is really Japanese tech, etc.
The most absurdly biased and inaccurate take on ASML I've ever seen, congrats.
If the machines are so easy to build and integrate, why isn't it happening in America?
fragmede 52 minutes ago [-]
Can't build shit in America. Not even data centers.
saberience 4 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
tjwebbnorfolk 3 hours ago [-]
ASML is the only real tech company in the EU. Just let them have this one :)
throwup238 6 hours ago [-]
EUV was developed in a joint venture with the Department of Energy and ASML, Intel, etc called EUV Corp. It’s why the US can export control it.
Farfignoggen 5 hours ago [-]
LOL, no Mention of IMEC(Interuniversity Microelectronics Centre) in the EUV development process and the only reason that the US can restrict the ASML EUV equipment is the EUV Light source and mirror optics for that is partially US produced and the IP there falls under US IP/Export restrictions!
From ASML:
"ASML’s extreme ultraviolet (EUV) light source was developed and is manufactured at its facility in San Diego, California. Acquired from the US firm Cymer in 2013, the R&D team here developed the laser-produced plasma (LPP) system that fires lasers at tin droplets 50,000 times per second to generate EUV light."
teknologist 5 hours ago [-]
Yes, and that changes what?
amelius 5 hours ago [-]
> Amazing looking machine!
As with most of this type of technology, most of the stuff you see is basically a giant refrigerator and giant vacuum cleaner. The actual meat is much smaller and hidden from view.
mDyJzDPmBdG 7 hours ago [-]
Depends on definition of machine. Do ISS, LHC or ITER count?
smolder 6 hours ago [-]
ASMLs machines can easily be "one of the most sophisticated" without stepping on LHC or ITERs toes. I'm not sure ISS qualifies anymore. I would have went with JWST.
0123456789ABCDE 6 hours ago [-]
no.
neither of the observations gp made is dependent upon the definition of machine, nor is it dependent on the inclusion of the examples you brought up in that definition.
6 hours ago [-]
johndear223 2 hours ago [-]
The lasers are made in San Diego, the lenses made in Germany.
arcticfox 6 hours ago [-]
> A great achievement of European science and technology (ducks).
It's a fantastic machine but the bulk of the achievement is clearly a joint European-American effort.
apexalpha 6 hours ago [-]
Then Apple M series is also a joint European-American effort, no? Since ARM is European?
Weirdly enough it never seems to work that way in discourse.
stingraycharles 6 hours ago [-]
Should add China to the list of pretty much all of them as well. It’s a silly take.
6 hours ago [-]
jorvi 6 hours ago [-]
In that case the internet is mostly due to the Brits (invention of packet switching at the NPL by Donald Davies). Cheers!
hvb2 6 hours ago [-]
Not even that, the company happens to be Dutch but it's employees are from everywhere. A company doesn't make anything, the employees do, especially in a sector like this.
The companies job is to hire well and create strong teams that work together.
spwa4 8 hours ago [-]
That's what makes this hard to interpret. The whole strategy of intel is that they have their own version of this machine, part of their "18A" design. The only reason they need the ASML machine is because of the "optics" (between quotes because at the frequencies they work at no optics work - only (bad) mirrors do. However you need make the mirrors accurate enough - we're talking far more accurate than the chips, as in sub-nanometer max deviation, they can function as optics with high losses, but low enough that exposure works). No American company can achieve even 10 times lower accuracy at the moment.
So is this giving up on their own version? That would mean their stock price is absolutely not justified at $110, and it should be more like $60-70 if not lower. Or is this "we have technical reasons to use this. We're still going to do 18A and it's still going to beat 2nm", which would mean their stock price is easily justified at $200 and it's high time to buy.
zmb_ 3 hours ago [-]
Intel does not have their own version of this machine. This ASML machine is a component in a very large system of machines from many manufacturers that runs wafers automatically from machine to machine until a month later a chip comes out the other end. That system is “18A”. Intel designs, builds and operates that system. Intel does not make the machines, they buy them and figure out how to configure and operate them as a part of the system.
whazor 7 hours ago [-]
As I understand it, the machine also needs lots of 'normal parts' and can be designed differently to fit the factory and the automation. Like if you need a pipe, instead of buying it from ASML, you can buy it from a local hardware vendor. And parts of the ASML also break, and those parts would be directly shipped from the vendor that makes the part. ASML manages the integration between these parts and each part can have multiple vendors that makes them according to the specs.
vrganj 8 hours ago [-]
Only the optics is an ... interesting way of phrasing it.
There was a great Economist article a while ago that talks about this. ASMLs moat isn't just the know-how to build the machines themselves. It's a network of suppliers all across Europe, specialized businesses doing one little part better than anyone else in the world.
This is the type of thing that Europe is still leading in, and it'll be incredibly hard to reproduce elsewhere.
You don't just need to figure out how to build an High-NA EUV machine. You need to figure out how to build or procure all of the parts that go into it. Many of these suppliers have exclusive contracts with ASML.
Yeah. ASML doesn't make the mirrors, but they have exclusive sales rights, exactly as you say. And yes, positioning them, for example, both in the fixed sense (mounting the mirrors in the machine) and in the dynamic sense (rapidly positioning wafers to nanometer-or-better accuracy below the beam, I forgot how quick exactly but it's 10s to 100s of times per second to maintain production rates) is very much not easy either. But it's "been done" (by teams of phds). Producing the mirrors has not been duplicated.
Of course, producing the EUV beam in the first place has also not been duplicated and it's Californian technology.
Intel 18A has a different strategy all together. I mean, it's not like they're saying much about it, but from the little we know, it's very different.
namibj 7 hours ago [-]
No the beam source we know how to create; it's just that the way to do so requires a factory sized machine that better be feeding 10~30 steppers or a pair for uptime/maintenance windows and then probably more like 50 steppers.
Free electron lasers are not hard at "mere EUV", and the accelerators to feed aren't either, it's just that an efficient setup requires recycling the beam which means bending it back which means a large (factory hall sized) accelerator at the beam energies needed for good EUV light.
lightedman 2 hours ago [-]
Uhh, you do not need an accelerator to generate EUV. It's literally just molten tin hit with a laser.
johndear223 2 hours ago [-]
Weiss makes the mirrors.
lvl155 4 hours ago [-]
Basically most of the technology was US govt funded at some point. Now the Dutch can just leech off of that. I guess that’s what they’re good at considering their long history with VOC and “mercantilism”.
johndear223 2 hours ago [-]
I was just reading about this in a tech magazine, couple of startups also trying other techniques of interest, one of them using helium atoms for the lithography. This uses pretty close to x-ray wavelengths of light. Amazing feats of engineering taking place in this crazy world of ours.
bilsbie 1 hours ago [-]
How come we don’t make chips with really small 3d printers?
dehrmann 26 minutes ago [-]
Sibling has a good comment about silicon. Another reason you're printing something like 100B transistors. So that's at least 100B raster steps. It would just take too long.
tbrownaw 21 minutes ago [-]
The closest thing there is is e-beam lithography. It isn't really practical.
wmf 52 minutes ago [-]
AFAIK you can't really print crystalline silicon so they have to start with a wafer and dope/etch into it to form transistors.
amelius 6 hours ago [-]
> ASML moved to camera-style anamorphic optics that magnify the mask by different amounts along the two axes
Does this mean they do high-resolution designs in the center of the lens and low-resolution designs in the periphery?
dyauspitr 10 hours ago [-]
Im rooting for Intel. I hate the current paradigm where all the best chips are made in one factory in Asia.
fsuts 9 hours ago [-]
Tsmc are opening 10 factories in USA at cost of $265bn
> As of 2025, the first fab has been completed and is producing four-nanometer (nm) chips.
matwood 6 hours ago [-]
One is built, OP said 10.
Orygin 5 hours ago [-]
Gotta start somewhere. Plus foxconn only abandoned 1 DC build out during Covid, a bit different from TSMC investing billions to build multiple, of which they already built 1.
cyanydeez 6 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
p_l 8 hours ago [-]
TSMC also AFAIK is forbidden from setting up bleeding-edge fabs outside of Taiwan?
adventured 8 hours ago [-]
Four more 2nm (or below) fabs in Arizona. That's bleeding-edge or very close to it.
dd8601fn 38 minutes ago [-]
By end of decade, no? Seems like domestic fab will always be two steps behind. I assume by design.
WarmWash 2 hours ago [-]
They're building 1.4nm in Taiwan
p_l 1 hours ago [-]
Will they remain bleeding edge by the time they are operational?
nasretdinov 9 hours ago [-]
IMO it's competition that makes better products in the end. If either party becomes a full monopolist the progress will stall (as already happened with Intel I guess)
jbstack 9 hours ago [-]
> as already happened with Intel I guess
In which sense? Intel is neither a full monopolist (AMD, ARM) nor has progress stalled (we're still getting a regular cycle of new generation CPUs which improve on the previous).
ahartmetz 8 hours ago [-]
Intel didn't do much to improve their CPUs while AMD was out of the competition with the Bulldozer disaster.
c0n5pir4cy 8 hours ago [-]
It was a pretty bad time - ARM wasn't really encroaching on any of their markets in the way they are now & AMD was struggling. Intel basically just left the engineering to rot & the business people to try and gouge consumers with things like the Intel Upgrade Service, low power CPUs that were essentially just normal cores but less rather than optimized, inflated prices etc.
It also allowed AMD to completely blindside them with Zen - so we're in a situation where AMD now dominates consumer desktop and arguably a lot of enterprise/DC instead of it balancing towards a more competitive centre.
toast0 2 hours ago [-]
Eh, xeon 2690 was released 2012q1 at 8 cores, 2690v4 was 2016q1 at 14 cores. Same suggested customer price. Clock speed dropped a bit, but IPC was way up (AES-NI had a big throughput increase among other things). IIRC, desktop core counts were pretty stagnant, but a Haswell/Broadwell desktop chip at the same corecount and similar clocks was much faster than a Ivy Bridge/Sandy Bridge.
During 2012-2016 AMD was firmly in the Bulldozer disaster.
In 2017, Zen1 came out, and Intel's tick/tock mostly stopped. Zen1 was better than Bulldozer, but not better than Intel. Zen2 in 2019 was the big moment, and Intel hadn't done much. I recall an interview where the AMD person (might have been Jim Keller) said they had been targetting Zen2 to be competitive with what they thought Intel would have when it came out. Since Intel was in their pipeline bubble, Zen2 was a big win.
PowerElectronix 8 hours ago [-]
Intel had a monopoly on bleeding edge cpu for a long time until they got stuck on 14nm for years, allowing TSMC to catch up and providing AMD the means to compete.
In a the best of timelines, intel, tsmc and samsung (and glofo maybe?) Would all have competitive fab nodes.
dzonga 6 hours ago [-]
yeah - I wouldn't bet against Intel.
they might have floundered in the past.
panther lakes I hear are pretty competitive with some of the apple silicone.
adrian_b 4 hours ago [-]
Intel Panther Lake is a serious improvement over the previous Intel CPUs, both in energy efficiency and in GPU performance. The good energy efficiency is a good sign for Intel's 18A CMOS fabrication process.
Nevertheless, it is worrying that the computers with Panther Lake CPUs have become much more expensive in comparison with their equivalents of last year with Arrow Lake, and this before adding the hugely increased costs for DRAM and SSDs.
It is also confusing for buyers that the 300-series Panther Lake part numbers that appear to be replacements for the previous 200-series Arrow Lake in most cases correspond to lower technical specifications, i.e. a much smaller GPU and lower clock frequencies.
The Panther Lake models that have the new big and very good GPU are extremely expensive and also hard to find, despite the fact that the GPU continues to be produced by TSMC. Perhaps TSMC has raised its price and prioritizes other customers, so Intel cannot get enough big GPUs, but even the Panther Lake models with the very small GPU (much smaller than Intel has used in many years for its mobile CPUs) have become far too expensive.
Because Panther Lake introduced a few important new features that could have been interesting for experiments in software development (e.g. FRED), I intended to buy some mini-PC with Panther Lake, but I gave up because even one that would cost double in comparison with the mini-PC with Arrow Lake H from last year that I have (i.e. around $1000 as barebone, instead of around $500) would be a downgrade in specs, instead of being an upgrade.
topspin 1 hours ago [-]
Intel is doing well. They have 18A yields up to 85% at Fab 52. That's huge for the foundry business: the best foundries are not all in Asia now.
Rumor is they're moving Nova Lake production mostly in-house due to 18A success.
sylware 5 hours ago [-]
I wish that, but for high performance RISC-V micro-achitectures.
Crescent island is air cooled and likely fast enough for a group of users running something like GLM 5.2 or Kimi K3.
I have no explanation other than people, researchers are comfortable with it and don't want to switch.
Also Nvidia arguably needs Intel more than vice versa, Intel now has SOTA fabs on the newest EUV technology, TSMC is at max capacity and they need to fight Apple and others for allocation...
It's an amazing piece of technology but this is... wildly wrong. ASML is a multi-national company that licenses IP largely from USA and Japan, but also Taiwan and Germany. The actual EUV light source is developed and produced in California by Cymer, which ASML acquired in 2013. But ASML was only permitted to acquire the company under a strict technology sharing and export control agreement with the US government. Additionally, a huge portion of the photolithography research is directly developed (and owned) by US companies and research organizations such as IBM, Albany NanoTech, and SEMATECH.
There is a reason why ASML's next-generation research photolithography machine is currently being installed and developed in upstate New York, and not somewhere in the Netherlands. The same reason that Cymer is still in San Diego instead of being relocated to Europe. Because it's American technology.
But Europe certainly plays a huge role in it.
https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/governor-hochul-announces-n...
https://research.ibm.com/blog/euv-center-albany-nstc
https://www.eetimes.com/asml-sematech-team-on-manufacturing-...
https://www.eetimes.com/asml-to-build-400-million-us-researc...
This is a wildly ignorant comment. The R&D lab in NY State if anything is an effort to copy IMEC, the world's leading research organization when it comes to semiconductor R&D. They essentially set and define the roadmap for node advancements and then the industry follows by actually implementing their innovations at scale in their fabs. I guess they are technically not in the Netherlands, being located about 50 miles south of the Dutch border in Belgium. And they have in fact have an EXE system of their own, and have had access to ASML's high-na tools since before they were even commercially available
Why is the Netherlands government even allowing this?
That is true not only for ASML, but for the semiconductor industry in general. The number of smaller, specialized companies for certain tools, chemicals and software is staggering. And they sit all over the US, Europe, Japan, Taiwan and Korea.
Strong mutual defense agreements cover four out of the five crucial countries here (NATO, Anpo, MDT US/ROK) and the last (Taiwan) has arms sales assurances.
It’s not like these are strongly opposed nations or anything. Part of the same fleet in some sense.
The really wild thing about this whole narrative is how unlikely this entire sequence of events was. Let's review:
1) Trump gives some rambling answer to an Estonian journalist in 2017 (or 2018) in which he says about 4 different things, all of which conflict with each other.
2) That journalist clips the answer to make it sound like Trump wants to leave NATO.
3) European leaders lose their mind and for the first time in 35 years actually up their military spending. Something that every US president since Bush Sr has made a major foreign policy goal that ever single administration failed at.
4) So completely by mistake, a journalist nobody has ever heard of, handed Trump the biggest foreign policy win for any US president since Bush Sr.
5) Russia invades Ukraine
6) Sweden and Finland join NATO
7) Trump wins the 2024 election and cuts off some of the Ukrainian aid (but not intelligence sharing).
8) The removal of US limitations on Ukraine allows them to strike Russian oil infrastructure.
9) Russia can no longer afford to fund their war in the way they had been.
10) Ukraine is now actually winning.
So somehow, Trump has gotten a huge foreign policy win and helped turn around the war in Ukraine completely by accident. Its like watching a cow talk.
Cymer was one of multiple vendors (Gigaphoton, XTREME) providing this sort of light source, and ASML acquired it because it couldn't achieve what they wanted (they needed 100+W and Cymer could only achieve 15W). ASML needed to control and fund the company, and add engineering talent, to achieve what they actually needed.
Oh and ASML bought Cymer because Gigaphoton (another company at basically the same stage of development as Cymer), being a Japanese company, objected to foreign control. Though if ASML knew the protectionist, insular direction the US was going to go they probably would rethink their past decisions.
So this retconning that Cymer is really the secret magic of ASML and the Netherlands is just stealing US ingenuity is hilarious stuff.
And for that matter, it is amazing how so often we hear about "American" tech that is actually overwhelmingly combining acquisitions and manpower from abroad. Like is an iPhone an "American" creation? LOL, no.
I never said anything about ASML stealing technology or ingenuity. The point is that EUV photolithography is an international effort. The machines don't exist at all without about 6 different countries contributing technology and expertise.
ASML has certainly proven itself to be a very capable integrator of many international technologies and processes.
Why isn't there an American company doing this? Why isn't an American company making the lasers, mirrors, metrology, vacuum handling tech, etc?
reason why US didn't produce most of these component because US gov didn't continue investment so privately owned enterprise take over from there namely ASML
that also reason why US can restrict EUV sales to china
Simultaneously Japan created its own initiative (EUVA), and Gigaphoton didn't rely upon the US initiative at all. And again in an alternate universe -- one where Japan isn't protectionist and Cymer wasn't out of financial runway and desperate -- we'd be talking about how ASML is really Japanese tech, etc.
https://youtu.be/MiUHjLxm3V0
Has a lot of the history
Yes the OP is completely biased.
If the machines are so easy to build and integrate, why isn't it happening in America?
From ASML:
"ASML’s extreme ultraviolet (EUV) light source was developed and is manufactured at its facility in San Diego, California. Acquired from the US firm Cymer in 2013, the R&D team here developed the laser-produced plasma (LPP) system that fires lasers at tin droplets 50,000 times per second to generate EUV light."
As with most of this type of technology, most of the stuff you see is basically a giant refrigerator and giant vacuum cleaner. The actual meat is much smaller and hidden from view.
neither of the observations gp made is dependent upon the definition of machine, nor is it dependent on the inclusion of the examples you brought up in that definition.
It's a fantastic machine but the bulk of the achievement is clearly a joint European-American effort.
Weirdly enough it never seems to work that way in discourse.
The companies job is to hire well and create strong teams that work together.
So is this giving up on their own version? That would mean their stock price is absolutely not justified at $110, and it should be more like $60-70 if not lower. Or is this "we have technical reasons to use this. We're still going to do 18A and it's still going to beat 2nm", which would mean their stock price is easily justified at $200 and it's high time to buy.
There was a great Economist article a while ago that talks about this. ASMLs moat isn't just the know-how to build the machines themselves. It's a network of suppliers all across Europe, specialized businesses doing one little part better than anyone else in the world.
This is the type of thing that Europe is still leading in, and it'll be incredibly hard to reproduce elsewhere.
You don't just need to figure out how to build an High-NA EUV machine. You need to figure out how to build or procure all of the parts that go into it. Many of these suppliers have exclusive contracts with ASML.
Here's the article, de-paywalled: https://archive.ph/jP1HX
Of course, producing the EUV beam in the first place has also not been duplicated and it's Californian technology.
Intel 18A has a different strategy all together. I mean, it's not like they're saying much about it, but from the little we know, it's very different.
Free electron lasers are not hard at "mere EUV", and the accelerators to feed aren't either, it's just that an efficient setup requires recycling the beam which means bending it back which means a large (factory hall sized) accelerator at the beam energies needed for good EUV light.
Does this mean they do high-resolution designs in the center of the lens and low-resolution designs in the periphery?
https://www.techrepublic.com/article/news-tsmc-us-investment...
Intel staying strong is still vital for competitiveness though
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/21/foxconn-mostly-abandons-10-b...
> As of 2025, the first fab has been completed and is producing four-nanometer (nm) chips.
In which sense? Intel is neither a full monopolist (AMD, ARM) nor has progress stalled (we're still getting a regular cycle of new generation CPUs which improve on the previous).
It also allowed AMD to completely blindside them with Zen - so we're in a situation where AMD now dominates consumer desktop and arguably a lot of enterprise/DC instead of it balancing towards a more competitive centre.
During 2012-2016 AMD was firmly in the Bulldozer disaster.
In 2017, Zen1 came out, and Intel's tick/tock mostly stopped. Zen1 was better than Bulldozer, but not better than Intel. Zen2 in 2019 was the big moment, and Intel hadn't done much. I recall an interview where the AMD person (might have been Jim Keller) said they had been targetting Zen2 to be competitive with what they thought Intel would have when it came out. Since Intel was in their pipeline bubble, Zen2 was a big win.
In a the best of timelines, intel, tsmc and samsung (and glofo maybe?) Would all have competitive fab nodes.
they might have floundered in the past.
panther lakes I hear are pretty competitive with some of the apple silicone.
Nevertheless, it is worrying that the computers with Panther Lake CPUs have become much more expensive in comparison with their equivalents of last year with Arrow Lake, and this before adding the hugely increased costs for DRAM and SSDs.
It is also confusing for buyers that the 300-series Panther Lake part numbers that appear to be replacements for the previous 200-series Arrow Lake in most cases correspond to lower technical specifications, i.e. a much smaller GPU and lower clock frequencies.
The Panther Lake models that have the new big and very good GPU are extremely expensive and also hard to find, despite the fact that the GPU continues to be produced by TSMC. Perhaps TSMC has raised its price and prioritizes other customers, so Intel cannot get enough big GPUs, but even the Panther Lake models with the very small GPU (much smaller than Intel has used in many years for its mobile CPUs) have become far too expensive.
Because Panther Lake introduced a few important new features that could have been interesting for experiments in software development (e.g. FRED), I intended to buy some mini-PC with Panther Lake, but I gave up because even one that would cost double in comparison with the mini-PC with Arrow Lake H from last year that I have (i.e. around $1000 as barebone, instead of around $500) would be a downgrade in specs, instead of being an upgrade.
Rumor is they're moving Nova Lake production mostly in-house due to 18A success.