The $400 million machine powering the future of chipmaking
Why this matters: a development in AI with implications for how people work, create, and decide.
Jos Benschop is climbing a ladder to get to the top of his newest machine. It’s a bit of a schlep. The contraption is the size of a double-decker bus—more than 150 tons of gleaming precision-milled aluminum covered in thousands of snaking tubes, colored cables, and pressurized tanks. From the ground, it looks like a futuristic V8 engine. When I reach the top with Benschop we’re looking down from about 15 feet in the air, with bunny-suited technicians scurrying around below. It’s more than 200 cubic meters of tech—“mechatronic devices that hold a few mirrors in a position with atomic precision,” he says, gesturing at the gargantuan apparatus. Benschop, a tall and grizzled 66-year-old, has spent over a decade working with his engineers to design this thing, but even so, he’ll sometimes look at it and go: Oh my God. Benschop is the executive vice president of technology for ASML, a Dutch company that is the linchpin of the microchip industry. If you want to make powerful chips to power phones or AI, a lithography machine like the one we’re standing on is what you need to create increasingly tiny circuitry. Lithography is the art and science of shining light on a silicon wafer to pattern out the transistors, wiring, and other components of the microchips that will be cut from it. The chipmaking field is essentially controlled by only two big players: ASML, which creates the lithography machines, and TSMC, the chipmaking giant. Nine years ago, ASML began selling machines that use a daring new way of patterning chip features. These machines employ extreme-ultraviolet light, or EUV—radiation well outside the visible spectrum that they produce by shooting lasers at tiny molten drops of tin, tens of thousands of times a second. Those first machines—the result of an R&D moonshot that lasted 16 years and cost about $10 billion—can craft transistor features with a resolution of 13 nanometers. This new machine can do even better: It has a resolution of just eight nanometers, the