Tagged foundry · show all articles
"Foundry" gets used constantly in AI hardware coverage without ever being explained. The concept it names is simpler than it sounds, and its history explains almost everything else in this cohort's foundry briefings.
Nvidia designs. AMD designs. Apple designs. Almost none of them manufacture. One Taiwanese company makes the leading-edge chips for nearly everyone who doesn't, and that single fact shapes more of the AI boom than any GPU announcement.
Samsung competes with TSMC for advanced-logic customers and with SK hynix for memory customers, using entirely different technology and entirely different scoreboards. Coverage that treats "Samsung" as one competition misses both.
Most countries rebuilding a domestic chip industry start with a mature node and work up. Japan's state-backed Rapidus is attempting to go straight to 2-nanometer production by 2027 — with IBM's help and more than 60 companies watching.
Panther Lake is shipping on 18A, Intel's most advanced node in over a decade. What the company has not yet done, as of this briefing, is prove the node can win business it didn't already have.
18A proved Intel could build a competitive process again. 14A is the node where the industry finds out whether anyone outside Intel wants to build on it — and the window to find out is now open.