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Reason077 an hour ago

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?

nish__ 20 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

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.

Keyframe 5 minutes ago | parent [-]

that's 100% yield which ain't happening

nish__ a few seconds ago | parent [-]

What would you expect yield to be?

Keyframe 6 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

dylan604 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

UncleOxidant 34 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

umanwizard an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

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

tooltalk 18 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

That restriction is only for the most advanced systems.

According to ASML's Q3 2025 filing, 42% of all system sales went to China.

phil21 26 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

squigz 22 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

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?