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TSMC Rejects High-NA EUV, Memory Giants Bet Big & Musk's Terafab Stirs ASML
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
TSMC's $400M High-NA EUV snub signals a hard cost ceiling in AI chip manufacturing — and the capital is flowing to advanced packaging instead. Plus SK Hynix's trillion-dollar capacity bet, Samsung's HBM pivot, and why Elon Musk sent ASML shares surging 9.5%.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
TSMC just said no to a four-hundred-million-dollar machine. That's the clearest signal from this week's semiconductor news, and it tells us something important about where the cost ceiling of AI chip manufacturing actually sits.
The capital that isn't going toward High-NA EUV is going somewhere. TSMC is redirecting it toward advanced packaging.
While TSMC is staying cautious on ASML's most expensive tools, Elon Musk is apparently interested in buying a lot of them. Musk addressed ASML employees virtually at the company's annual conference, pitching his Terafab chip fabrication project.
The memory side of the AI supply chain is moving fast. SK Hynix plans to triple total wafer capacity and double DRAM output to one million units per month by twenty thirty to thirty-one, through its Yongin facility and M15X expansion.
One implication of this AI-driven supply chain pull is showing up in consumer hardware. Xbox has internally flagged that storage and memory costs could rise five times by twenty twenty-seven, driven by AI data centres outbidding consumer electronics for silicon allocation.
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