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Comment by nish__ | Hacker News Reader

Anyone want to start a fab with me? We can buy an ASML machine and figure out the rest as we go. Toronto area btw

A dozen or so well-resourced tech titans in China are no doubt asking themselves this same question right now.

Of course, it takes quite some time for a fab to go from an idea to mass production. Even in China. Expect prices to drop 2-3 years from now when all the new capacity comes online?

At that point, it'll be the opposite problem as more capacity than demand will be available. These new fabs won't be able to pay for themselves. Every tic receives a tok.

China cannot buy ASML machines. All advanced semiconductor manufacturing in China is done with stockpiled ASML machines from before the ban.

Would you really need ASML machines to do DDR5 RAM? Honest question, but I figured there was competition for the non-bleeding edge - perhaps naively so.

Yes. You need 16nm or better for DDR5.

ASML cannot be avoided for 7nm and better due to EUV.

As someone who knows next to nothing about this space, why can China not build their own machines? Is ASML the only company making those machines? If so, why? Is it a matter of patents, or is the knowledge required for this so specialized only they've built it up?

Yes. ASML is the only company making these machines. And both, they own thousands of patents and are also the only ones with the institutional knowledge required to build them anyway.

I thought Fermi paradox is about nukes; I increasingly think it's about chips

They can - if they are willing to invest a a lot of money over several years. The US got Nuclear bombs in a few years during WWII with this thinking, and China (or anyone else) could too. This problem might be harder than a bomb, but the point remains, all it takes is a willingness to invest.

Of course the problem is we don't see what would be missed by doing this investment. If you put extra people into solving this problem that means less people curing cancer or whatever. (China has a lot of people, but not unlimited)

Designing such an advanced lithography machine is probably a Manhattan Project scale task. China is indeed trying to make progress and they will probably get there someday but for now ASML is the only company in the world that knows how to build these or anything remotely close.

ASML is not the only sole supplier involved. There's a few more layers of them you have to replace.

Right, the most famous example is Zeiss which is the only company in the world that builds the high-precision mirrors needed for the most advanced ASML machines. I’m not sure if those are subject to export bans too, but even if they are, I think China could eventually figure out how to build them. It’s just a matter of a huge amount of R&D that would need to be done first.

If you want EUV (lowest nm), you'll need ASML, and they won't sell it to random strangers. EUV isn't exported to China. Only the end product is.

That restriction is only for the most advanced systems. According to ASML's Q3 2025 filing, 42% of all system sales went to China.

SK Hynix also has significant memory manufacturing presence in China; or about 40% of the company's entire DRAM capacity.

I think it would be more like 5-7 years from now if they started breaking ground on new fabs today.

My napkin math:

According to my research, these machines can etch around 150 wafers per hour and each wafer can fit around 50 top-of-the-line GPUs. This means we can produce around 7500 AI chips per hour. Sell them for $1k a piece. That's $7.5 million per hour in revenue. Run the thing for 3 days and we recover costs.

I'm sure there's more involved but that sounds like a pretty good ROI to me.

that's 100% yield which ain't happening

What would you expect yield to be?

Sounds like the kind of question ChatGPT would be good at answering...

With no prior experience? 0%. Those machines are not just like printers :-)

We'll have to gain some experience then :)

Sure - once you have dozens of engineers and 5 years under your belt you'll be good to go!

This will get you started: https://youtu.be/B2482h_TNwg

Keep in mind that every wafer makes multiple trips around the fab, and on each trip it visits multiple machines. Broadly, one trip lays down one layer, and you may need 80-100 layers (although I guess DRAM will be fewer). Each layer must be aligned to nanometer precision with previous layers, otherwise the wafer is junk.

Then as others have said, once you finish the wafer, you still need to slice it, test the dies, and then package them.

Plus all the other stuff....

You'll need billions in investment, not millions - good luck!

Thank you. This is going to be way harder than I thought.

Especially when the plan is to just run them in a random rented commercial warehouse.

I drive by a large fab most days of the week. A few breweries I like are down the street from a few small boutique fabs. I got to play with some experimental fab equipment in college. These aren't just some quickly thrown together spaces in any random warehouse.

And it's also ignoring the water manufacturing process, and having the right supply chain to receive and handle these ultra clean discs without introducing lots of gunk into your space.

Yeah good point, the clean room aspect of it is vital - when you're fabricating at the nano scale, a single speck of dust is a giant boulder ruining your lithography.

Not with that attitude.

My man.

A man can dream of no waste!

What about the $10b to build the facility (including clean air/water/chemicals/etc)?

Rent a warehouse.

It would be cheaper to bulldoze the warehouse and start over.

Rent a warehouse in one of the non Han dominated areas of China, where you can use all you want from the city's drinking water supply and pump all your used chemicals into the nearby river. Make sure to totally automate your robotic production line so you don't need to employ any locals.

And then spend the next five years building the actual fab around it? Like what’s the plan here.

No you're right. My math is very off.

You should deactivate your bc donation link since you admitted this

The catch is if you started today with plenty of money (billions of dollars!) and could hire the right experts as you need them (this is a big if!) there would still be a couple years between today and producing 150 wafers per house. So the question isn't what does the math look like today, it is what the math looks like in 2 years - if you could answer that why didn't you start two years ago so you could get the current prices?

A photolithography machine doesn't etch anything (well, some EUV machines do it as an unwanted side effect because of plasma generation), it just patterns some resist material. Etching is happening elsewhere. Also, keep in mind, you'll need to do multiple passes through a photolithography machine to pattern different steps of the process - it's not a single pass thing.

yeaaahhh.. these fabs don't just have a button that says "punch out a top of the line nvidia GPU"

You're right. I'm throwing away the napkin.

it's just a bunch of melted sand. How hard can it be?

As someone with no skills in the space, no money, and lives near Ottawa: I'd love to help start a fab in Ontario.

Right on, partner. I think there's a ton of demand for it tbh

I'll do the engineering so we're good on that front. Just need investors.

I think I have a few dollars left on a Starbucks gift card. I'm in!

Hear me out- artisanal DRAM.

I'm listening.

Bathtub semiconductors! Shameless plug: https://wiki.fa-fo.de/orga:donate

Every transistor carefully hand-wired with love, giving each bit its own individual characteristic, for more organic, natural data.

You've cracked the funding problem!

You need to sell the artisanal DRAM to HiFi hucksters. Get Monster Cable on board to say their cables can only reach peak warmth, punch, and clarity - when using gear with artisanal DRAM. You'll easily sell into that market at $10k per GB...

This existed and it was called LOL memory (little old lady memory). It was knitted by little old ladies, being careful of which wires passed through which cores of course. It was ROM, not RAM.

Some early memory was woven: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_rope_memory

We could bring it back.

Locally sourced artisanal DRAM

I hope you have very deep pockets. But I'm cheering you on from the sidelines.

Just need a half billion in upfront investment. And thank you for the support :)

So, playing the Mega Powerball are you?

I made a website: https://ontario-chips.vercel.app/

wonder which one will find a winner faster...

It's a toss up.

I suppose it would help if I could read the whole page: I cannot see the left few characters on Firefox on Android. What did you make this with?

Note that fixing the site won't increase my chances of donating, I'm from the ASML country ;)

That's annoying... I made it with Next.js and Tailwind CSS tho. Hosted on Vercel.

Should be fixed now. Cheers!

I'll happily invest $100 into this project in exchange for stock. let me know.

Kickstarter time? That would set some records.

I can't invest, your company doesn't have "AI" in the name and your business plan doesn't seem to involve shoving unwanted chatbots down everyone's throats at all. That's no way to run a modern business!

that is an understatement

Sure, we can work on brining in TinyTapeout to modern fab

Since you admitted this is not feasible, you need to deactivate your bc donation link or else that's very sketchy.

Only if you put up the 10 billion dollars.

Machines are less than 400 million.

And the cost of the people to run those machines, and the factories that are required to run the machines?

Dont forget RAM.

I'll do it for free. And I'm sure we could rent a facility.

I think you are vastly underestimating how a modern fab works. The average cost is 10 billion and takes a about 10 years to build. They are very complex and even the slightest issue can ruin yields. There is a reason why there are so few.

Yeah you're right. I was way off.

Why is your bitcoin donation still active then?

You're just talking about a lithography machine. Patterning is one step out of thousands in a modern process (albeit an important one). There's plenty more stuff needed for a production line, this isn't a 3D printer but for chips. And that's just for the FEOL stuff, then you still need to do BEOL :). And packaging. And testing (accelerated/environmental, too). And failure analysis. And...

Also, you know, there's a whole process you'll need to develop. So prepare to be not making money (but spending tons of it on running the lines) until you have a well tested PDK.

> 3D printer but for chips

how about a farm of electron microscopes? these should work

Canon has been working on an alternative to EUV lithography called nanoimprint lithography. It would be a bit closer to the idea of having an inkjet printer make the masks to etch the wafers. It hasn't been proven in scale and there's a lot of thinking this won't really be useful, but it's neat to see and maybe the detractors are wrong.

https://global.canon/en/technology/nil-2023.html

https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/nanoimprint-lithograph...

They'll still probably require a good bit of operator and designer knowledge to work around whatever rough edges exist in the technology to keep yields high, assuming it works. It's still not a "plug it in, feed it blank wafers, press PRINT, and out comes finished chips!" kind of machine some here seem to think exist.

But what if it's a bubble driven by speculation?

It wouldn't pay off.

Starting a futures exchange on RAM chips, on the other hand...

Buying may be possible but when will you get it?

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