this post was submitted on 26 Dec 2025
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The lithography machine (the machine that constructs the silicon chips at the hearts of our devices) is THE most complex piece of tech that exists. If you look up how they work, almost every piece of the tech is operating at the limits of current human capabilty in terms of precision and our understanding of physics.
Going from ordering one, to having one set up and running in a FAB, can take a decade.
You might be able to get older generations of lithographic manufacturing up and running faster, but these things require SERIUS infrastructure around them.
You can't just set up production in a year or even two.
Not the same thing.
We're talking about semiconductor lithography.
Lithography machines operate on nanometer precision and require a clean-room environment that makes the standards of medical facilities look like a joke. The machines required are more like ultra-complex projectors operating at wavelengths of light we had to spend decades figuring out how to even produce, not to mention the optics required to be precise enough to construct chips with features so small you can count the atoms they are made out of. The robotic machinery that moves the silicon wafers around is stone-age tech in comparison, and is used because the environment these machines require can't handle a human existing in the same room, because just the particles from our breath would introduce problems.
Getting some robotic arms welding and screwing metal and plastic together to assemble a car is nothing in comparison.
There are integrated circuits in a Tesla, but they don't make them. Remember how the car industry completely imploded back in 2022 during a shortage of the chips used in cars? None of them make them. No car company has their own semiconductor fab.
Almost every tech manufacturer, buys fab manufacturing capacity from TSMC or another big fab maintainer.