One Tool to Kill Two Chip Monopolies

I saw SemiAnalysis publish an article, How to Kill 2 Monopolies with 1 Tool, and I immediately reached out to your team and I was like, how do I talk to somebody about this? This is incredible because we are unknowledgeable, to say the least, about this area of AI. So we were really excited to talk to you. Give us like the premise of How to Kill 2 Monopolies with 1 Tool and what it's all about.

Could we actually just back up for just a quick second? I want to, I want to learn about you and your, your role at SemiAnalysis and then get into the paper.

Sure. Yeah. So SemiAnalysis, generally, we're an industry research firm that covers sort of the full AI and semiconductor stack. That's everything from raw materials and chipmakers that make the chips up through packaging, through AI accelerators, data centers, into LLMs and the economics of tokens and things like that. And I'm sort of on the far end of that spectrum, up in chipmaking. So that's the equipment, that's the process technology, that's the raw materials that you use to make the chips. So naturally, Substrate's announcement was kind of an exciting thing for us. I guess the basic premise is that they are announcing a tool or announced a tool that is, at least on paper, very competitive in terms of capability with ASML's latest and greatest lithography tool, which for those unfamiliar, that's sort of the key piece of chipmaking equipment that limits how good these chips can be, basically how small, how cost efficient, things like that. So, so for them to come out and say, hey, we have a tool that's just as good as ASML's at 1/10 of the cost, And not only that, but we're trying to also disrupt TSMC by not just building this lithography tool that competes with ASML, but entire fab and process that competes with TSMC is exciting, but also bold and right.