Nathan Lambert
speaker
1,814 appearances
3 recordings
2 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard 1 Feb
Nathan Lambert’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.
Appearances
You still, you know, you know, cars, they all have semiconductors in them everywhere. Fridges, semiconductors everywhere. There's these funny stories about how Russians were taking apart laundry machines because they had certain like Texas instrument chips that they could then repurpose and put into like their machines. They're anti-missile missile things, right? Like their S-400 or whatever.
You would know more about this, but there's all sorts of like everything about semiconductors is so integral to every part of our lives.
I don't think it's necessarily breaking the reliance. I think it's getting TSMC to build in the US. So taking a step back, TSMC produces most of the world's chips, especially on the foundry side. There's a lot of companies that build their own chips. Samsung, Intel, STMicro, Texas Instruments, analog devices, all these kinds of companies build their own chips and XP.
But more and more of these companies are outsourcing to TSMC and have been for multiple decades.
Sure. So historically, supply chain was companies would build their own chips. It would be a company started. They'd build their own chips. And then they'd design the chip and build the chip and sell it. Over time, this became really difficult because the cost of building a fab continues to compound. every single generation.
Of course, figuring out the technology for it is incredibly difficult regardless, but just the dollars and cents that are required, ignoring, saying, hey, yes, I have all the technical capability, which it's really hard to get that by the way, right? Intel's failing, Samsung's failing, et cetera.
But if you look at just the dollars to spend to build that next generation fab, it keeps growing, right? Sort of like Moore's law is halving the cost of chips every two years. There's a separate law that's sort of like doubling the cost of fabs every handful of years.
And so you look at a leading edge fab that is going to be profitable today that's building, you know, three nanometer chips or two nanometer chips in the future. That's going to cost north of 30, 40 billion dollars. Right. And that's just for like a token amount. That's for a like that's like the base building block. You probably need to build multiple. Right.
And so when you look at the industry over the last, you know, if I go back 20, 30 years ago. there were 20, 30 companies that could build the most advanced chips, and then they would design them themselves and sell them, right? So companies like AMD would build their own chips. Intel, of course, still builds their own chips. They're very famous for it. IBM would build their own chips.
And you could keep going down the list. All these companies built their own chips. Slowly, they kept falling like flies. And that's because of what TSMC did, right? They created the foundry business model, which is, I'm not going to design any chips. I'm just going to contract manufacturer chips for other people. And one of their early customers is NVIDIA, right?
NVIDIA is the only semiconductor company that's doing more than a billion dollars of revenue that was started in the era of Foundry, right? Every other company started before then and at some point had fabs. which is actually incredible, right? You know, like AMD and Intel and Broadcom. Such a great fact.
It's like everyone had fabs at some point or, you know, some companies like Broadcom, it was like a merger, amalgamation of various companies that rolled up. But even today, Broadcom has fabs, right? They build iPhone RF radio chips sort of in... Colorado for Apple, right?
All these companies had fabs, and for most of the fabs, they threw them away or sold them off or they got rolled into something else. And now everyone relies on TSMC, right? Including Intel, their latest PC chip uses TSMC chips, right? It also uses some Intel chips, but it uses TSMC process.
Yeah. So, I mean, like I mentioned, right, the cost of building a fab is so high. The R&D is so difficult. And when you look at, like, these companies that had their own vertical stack, there was an antiquated process of, like, okay, like, I'm so hyper-customized to each specific chip.
But as we've gone through the history of sort of like the last 50 years of electronics and semiconductors, A, you need more and more specialization, right? Because Moore's law has died. Denard scaling has died, i.e. chips are not getting better just for free, right? You know, from manufacturing, you have to make real architectural innovations, right?
Google is not just running on Intel CPUs for web serving. They have a YouTube chip, they have TPUs, they have pixel chips, they have a wide diversity of chips that, you know, generate all the economic value of Google, right? Running, you know, it's running all the services and stuff. And so, and this is just Google and you could go across any company in the industry and it's like this, right?
Cars contain 5,000 chips, you know, 200 different varieties of them, right? All these random things. A Tesla door handle has two chips, right? It's ridiculous. And it's a cool door handle, right? You don't think about it, but it has two really chipped penny chips in there, right?
Anyway, so as you have more diversity of chips, as you have more specialization required, and the cost of fabs continues to grow, you need someone who is laser focused on building the best process technology and making it as flexible as possible.
You know, there's more failure points, right? You know, you could have one little process related to like some sort of like chemical etch or some sort of like plasma etch or, you know, some little process that screws up. You didn't engineer it right. And now the whole company falls apart. You can't make chips. Right.
And so super, super powerful companies like Intel, they had like the weathering storm to like, hey, they still exist today, even though they really screwed up their manufacturing process. Right. Right. and focusing on specific workloads rather than all of these different things. And so you get more diversity of chips.
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