Infrastructure

Foundry (Semiconductor Foundry)

A company that manufactures chips designed by other companies — TSMC and Samsung are the only two that can currently make the most advanced ones at scale.

Most chip designers — Nvidia, Apple, AMD, Qualcomm among them — don't own the factories that make their chips. They design the chip and hand the blueprint to a foundry, which owns the billion-dollar fabrication plants and does the actual manufacturing. This 'fabless' split lets a design company move fast without carrying the enormous fixed cost of a fab.

At the cutting edge, that division of labor concentrates enormous power in whichever handful of foundries can actually produce the most advanced chips — which in turn concentrates power further upstream, in the single company that makes the lithography machines those foundries all depend on to print those chips in the first place.

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