The Most Complex Thing Humans Have Ever Made

I don't think a lot of people realize that semiconductors, specifically the types of chips used in AI, is the most complex piece of machinery that humans have ever produced. I fly to Taiwan tomorrow representing Nvidia. And if you don't know, Taiwan, which is a small island off the coast of China, is where most of the world's semiconductors are manufactured. Many people think that Nvidia makes chips. They'll say that they'll sell shovels during the gold rush. But in reality, what Nvidia does is design the chips. And then sends those designs to a semiconductor manufacturing company, or TSMC, who then prints the designs onto silicon wafers using an advanced technique called extreme ultraviolet lithography, using a machine that is only developed and sold by one company in the Netherlands called ASML. Then those wafers must be packaged with memory, a specific type of memory, HBM4, high bandwidth memory, which is only produced by a handful of companies, many of them out of Korea, like SK Hynix and Samsung. This is before we add things like optics for networking or cooling, which is why advanced semiconductor manufacturing is so hard to recreate. It required immense specialization over decades from companies in the US, and Taiwan, and Korea, and the Netherlands. I've never been to Taiwan, I'm super excited to go. Any videos that you guys would like to see while I'm there, leave in the comments below.