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ASML became the chokepoint for cutting-edge chips

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Re: ASML became the chokepoint for cutting-edge chips

#191

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

locallost wrote: post #182
CGMthrowaway wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Carl Zeiss Meditec /= Carl Zeiss. $AFX is the publicly traded non-semis division. Carl Zeiss AG is the parent company which is private

Correct. Funny enough though, their corporate structure and the name AG means they do have stocks, but they are not traded and 100% privately owned. For some reason I see this often with German companies, e.g. the German railway. Not sure why that is, although for the railway plausible since they are owned by the state that might eventually want to sell parts of it.

I believe the two applicable options to have a company that counts as its own "person" is either AG or GmbH (~= LLC / "limited").

There is also SE which is a EU form for an AG, and various "partnership" forms that involve a partner that's fully liable. Usually, that partner is not an actual person but a "legal person", i.e. another SE or GmbH.

Even if you're not listed on a stock market, you might want to take on investments, e.g. "give me 10 million for 5% of the company" and I assume the latter is much easier with an AG.

Re: ASML became the chokepoint for cutting-edge chips

#192

Post by robwwilliams »

locallost wrote: post #182
CGMthrowaway wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Carl Zeiss Meditec /= Carl Zeiss. $AFX is the publicly traded non-semis division. Carl Zeiss AG is the parent company which is private

Correct. Funny enough though, their corporate structure and the name AG means they do have stocks, but they are not traded and 100% privately owned. For some reason I see this often with German companies, e.g. the German railway. Not sure why that is, although for the railway plausible since they are owned by the state that might eventually want to sell parts of it.

Zeiss and Schott are both owned in their entirety by a foundation that is not allowed to sell shares. Most of the dividends go to larger research institutions in southern Germany (about $80 million to Heidelberg, Stuttgart, Tübingen, Freiburg, Ulm, Mainz, Jena).

Re: ASML became the chokepoint for cutting-edge chips

#193

Post by jltsiren »

mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #174
lijok wrote: post #108

ASML are not the chokepoint for chips. Zeiss are. ASML can hire more engineers and build more machines. Zeiss cannot hire more mirror grinders. And noone wants to train as one.

What is preventing Zeiss from paying higher salaries to mirror grinders, so that young people consider that career over alternatives?

Uncertain long-term career prospects that depend on a single employer. If you pay enough to make long-term prospects irrelevant, you may end up attracting the wrong kind of people. People who can't be trained do the job well enough, or people who will quit after earning enough. And you may end up losing your existing employees. They may quit if they don't get paid as much as the new hires, or they may FIRE if they do.

Re: ASML became the chokepoint for cutting-edge chips

#194

Post by ericmay »

theptip wrote: post #176
rgalate wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best explanation as to why ASML is so dominant is that they have locked out the best suppliers by signing exclusivity deals with them. If you want to compete with ASML you have to vertically build: the best lenses, the best lasers, the best metrology. A new entrant would need to replace ten different world-class vendors simultaneously. Unlike common business wisdom that dictates having multiple suppliers to mitig…

It does seem like the USG should fund a few $10B to build out the alternative stack, given the strategic sensitivity. Best time to have started would have been 20y ago, second best is today. This is small change in the military budget.

Why would the US need to fund and build out an alternative stack? ASML is de facto controlled by the United States.

Of course, having competitors is probably a good thing...

Re: ASML became the chokepoint for cutting-edge chips

#195

Post by sfn42 »

nextaccountic wrote: post #38
sbarre wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly I thought the same, but after watching a couple of videos on how EUV actually works, and what ASML (and the 1,200 other specialized companies that feed into its supply chain) built.. I can understand why you can't just take one apart and copy it. There's (apparently) 4 decades of accumulated cutting edge scientific research that has gone into these machines. I suspect the machinery, process and human experti…

Maybe copying it is too fragile (but I note that China copied the F-35) But in this case the Chinese will just develop their own alternative, that might work as good or even better

Hasn't happened yet.

Re: ASML became the chokepoint for cutting-edge chips

#196

Post by Danox »

random3 wrote: post #141
quanto wrote: post #133

I have an interesting discussion with a senior colleague: why ASML? why are they by far the best? Their competitors are a few generations behind. The colleague claimed that there is no special magic. It's not that ASML is using some otherwise unknown laws of physics nor is any single step or component particularly special or novel. It's just that they meticulously optimized each step, and the sum of such steps is the…

Veritasium has a nice video about it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiUHjLxm3V0 Obviously, there are a lot of reasons why. But it boils down to having the vision, the belief and the strength to follow through over many years. It's important to not confound vision with random Kool-Aid. Instead it's grounded in research. That research is itself grounded in a strong vision and belief — it got laughed by the entire phys…

Very true one thing you have to be impressed with is ASML willingness over time to iterate and iterate again nose to the grindstone. More companies could learn a lesson from that. There were several American companies that had it all in the last 60 years and squandered it. IBM, Xerox, Kodak, US Steel.

Re: ASML became the chokepoint for cutting-edge chips

#197

Post by Danox »

KK7NIL wrote: post #165
CamperBob2 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm tempted to call that pure luck. As far as they knew, crypto would be the killer app. However, if you start with the assumption that at some point, people are going to need a lot of fast parallel compute for something , you could rationally justify their long-term strategy. They skated where the proverbial puck was going. They couldn't see the puck, but they were pretty sure there was one. In hindsight that really…

Nvidia subsidized machine learning research for years (both with CUDA, hardware donations and developing what was a very niche product line just for them) before deep learning became big, much less the advent of LLMs. Certainly Jensen seemed to have an extremely long view on this burgeoning machine learning market in the early 2010's.

It didn’t hurt that they had a two companies named Intel and Microsoft that completely missed the boat where GPUs or mobile computing were concerned both are currently the top two companies in tech today by market cap?

Re: ASML became the chokepoint for cutting-edge chips

#198

Post by Danox »

Liftyee wrote: post #120
dzonga wrote: post #63

one thing not mentioned is how China is using the older tech DUV's to print advanced chips since replicating EUVs is close to impossible.

If ASML could do it, China will also do it. It's just a matter of development time and resources, both of which are plentiful in China.

Didn’t Japan just recently restarted their own project in this area?

https://www.rapidus.inc/en/news_topics/information/rapidus-b...

https://www.semimedia.cc/18196.html

If China and Japan are currently working on it, certainly South Korea is not far behind.

Re: ASML became the chokepoint for cutting-edge chips

#199

Post by mitthrowaway2 »

jltsiren wrote: post #193
mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is preventing Zeiss from paying higher salaries to mirror grinders, so that young people consider that career over alternatives?

Uncertain long-term career prospects that depend on a single employer. If you pay enough to make long-term prospects irrelevant, you may end up attracting the wrong kind of people. People who can't be trained do the job well enough, or people who will quit after earning enough. And you may end up losing your existing employees. They may quit if they don't get paid as much as the new hires, or they may FIRE if they do…

How come FAANG companies don't have this same problem of people quitting after earning enough? They get paid much more, even without taking on the risk of being tied to a single employer.

The answer is that some people do quit and retire early, but even more are attracted to that career like moths to a flame, and work until they can't.

I do think they should raise pay for their existing employees at the same time. In fact, they should tie the compensation to progression in skill and experience, so that people who just came for the money and aren't cut out for the work or aren't in it for the long haul aren't attracted to the job. That's basically the traditional model anyway.

And yeah paying employees well might cost a bit of money (but really, not that much in the scope of things). If talent is their production bottleneck, it will be well worth the expense.

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