Keep pulling the thread on Christophe Fouquet.
Companies developing AI hardware are demanding a 16-fold increase in transistor density every two years, a significant acceleration of the traditional Moore's Law.
Christophe Fouquet predicts that the trend of increasing transistor density, in line with Moore's Law, will continue for at least another 20 years.
TSMC's adoption of EUV technology for its 7nm and 5nm nodes gave it a competitive advantage over Intel, which did not adopt EUV at the same time.
The relationship between ASML and its optics partner Zeiss has created such a high level of interdependency that the two companies are effectively inseparable.
xAI is reportedly building a supercomputer named "Colossus" that will use 100,000 GPUs.
Future logic and memory chips will undergo major design changes to be further optimized for AI workloads, as current chips like GPUs and HBM were not originally designed for AI.
Geopolitical decoupling in the semiconductor industry risks increasing costs, as manufacturing chips in the US and Europe is significantly more expensive than in Asia.
Due to a lack of access to EUV lithography, China's semiconductor manufacturing capability is estimated to be 10 to 15 years behind the leading edge.
Manufacturing advanced logic chips in high volume and at an economically viable cost is not possible without EUV lithography technology.
Government subsidy programs like the CHIPS Act are insufficient for long-term success in semiconductor manufacturing because they do not address the underlying structural cost disadvantages of operating in regions like the US and Europe.
ASML partnered with German optics company Zeiss for many years to co-develop the complex optics required for its EUV lithography systems.
The primary obstacles to achieving a 16x increase in transistor density every two years for AI are the associated costs and energy consumption.