"Real men have fabs." - Jerry Sanders, first CEO of AMD.
Actually, AMD, Nvidia, and Apple need to build their own fabs. Maybe Google, Amazon, and Meta too.
You can easily end up like AMD or Intel spending years with your own fab that’s uncompetitive.
One of the best things that ever happened to AMD was spinning off their fabs.
Intel only recently righted their ship after spending years with fabs that couldn’t keep up with competition, and even Panther Lake still contains some TSMC silicon.
The AI boom is inevitably not going to last forever. Either demand will subside or production will increase. High prices in tech rarely stick around.
You could.
Or you could have no fab and no supply of chips for your business.
Making chips on an uncompetitive lithographic process means your chips are worth less.
There is no scenario where not having a fab is beneficial.
Apple will have to build their own fabs, whether they like it or not. And they will need to make it competitive if they want to stay in business.
Mmm, I think that's an overly strong statement.
In the scenario where Apple has a fab that's doing work at a 2030 level in 2030, that's great, especially if everyone else is, by their standards, doing work at a 2025 level. In the scenario where Apple's fab is doing work at a 2030 level in 2035, and another fab is doing work at a 2035 level, owning their own fab has suddenly become a liability. If they had used that money to hire the output of other fabs, then as soon as it became clear that another one was eclipsing the one they were using, they could simply switch. And given the way businesses operate, it would be very hard to justify closing down their own fab to use the one that was outperforming it.
Now, granted, that's not an especially likely scenario, but it is a very realistic one.
We can observe with Apple’s pricing staying stable that they have some of the best supplier arrangements in the industry.
They are literally being limited by TSMC (as well as the DRAM makers) because they don't have their own fabs.