The Ledger, every show

“The cost per transistor is actually going up in a lot of cases”

“And now I think that's actually gonna be a real plant in Arizona. And I think it's gonna have decent capacity enough to sort of satisfy the U.S. Military's needs and Apple's needs. And it will be, I don't think it'll be even a generation behind. I think it'll …”

“It doesn't mean the U.S. Actually can do advanced chips because that plant is going to be entirely dependent on expertise and knowledge base from the mothership in Taiwan.”

“And China for years has been trying to poach people out of TSMC to come build their foundries. And it just hasn't worked. Like you, it's something about the whole body of knowledge that's just too, you just can't copy and paste.”

“And I think that's going to have important implications, probably not for mobile or compute, But for all the other things that are getting chips built into them, cars, especially cars, home devices, internet of things, all of that is probably going to end up i…”

“There's only about a hundred companies in the world that really can design their own chips other than chip companies, right? It's mostly the big internet companies and the big industrial companies.”

“Moore's law is slowing, right? It is not 18 months anymore. It's five years.”

“There's still, you know, a good, I don't know, 10 years of shrinking possible.”

“It's going to shrink. Most of those companies won't survive, but enough will that there's something interesting going on there.”

“Because if you look at sort of the autonomous cars that are out there today, like I live in San Francisco and there's autonomous cruise cars driving around. They have 10, 20,000 dollars of chips in them, right?”

“And they have spent a hundred billion dollars, two hundred billion dollars over the last 10 years subsidizing the growth of their semiconductor industry.”

“There are probably 2000 legitimate fabless design chip companies in China today.”

“The number of chips produced every year, or the wafers produced every year, 90% of them are what we would call trailing edge processes, you know, 80 nanometer and up.”

“All of that has to shrink down. And the only way to sort of be able to deliver true autonomy is sort of a 1002 thousand dollar system, which is almost certainly going to have to have advanced edge, advanced process chips in them.”

“20 years ago, there used to be 2000 or so fabless design companies in the US and Europe. Today, there are probably 200 plus a handful of startups.”

“To build a modern cutting edge fab is, is ten billion dollars easily.”

“There's often only one or two vendors for any given part. And you see, they have, you know, gross margins in the sixties and seventies and operating margins in the twenties.”

“Today, there's too many GPUs, NVIDIA's writing off tons of inventory.”

“When I started covering the industry in the early 2000, gross margins for chip, most chip companies were in the 30 percents, the 20 percents.”