$20 billion for a new fab is a lot of money, even to Apple.

DetroitThrow 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Closer to $40b for a new fab for an established company to do it all correctly. It's a much more major investment to open a fab without ever doing it before, then continually use the brain power/institutional knowledge you've built up to stay near the forefront of fab tech, and then basically have weird incentives to build a foundry for only your products rather than the world at large.

You're setting yourself up for making a huge part of your future revenue stream being set aside for ongoing chipfab capex and research engineering. And that's a huge gamble, since getting this all setup is not guaranteed to succeed.

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JKCalhoun 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Is that true? I guess what I mean is, is it $40B if you are trying to replicate the scale of a TSMC fab? Or could you do it for considerably less if the fab is initially designed to the needs of single customer (Apple)?

	▲	DetroitThrow 14 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Closer to $40B for some of the latest fabs from TSMC you're seeing, yes. While there could be huge simplification in SoC and packaging processes if it was focused on a single product, Apple's needs will likely still be about having cutting edge processors, so it would still be pretty high even if they were to just buy TSMC.

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HardCodedBias 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

If it were only 20B then Apple would jump at the chance.

As would almost innumerable others.

	▲	JKCalhoun 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Well, if the future of your company depends on a fab, twice $20B is cheap.