This is long - sorry.

I've read about this, and chip manufacturing is not like other manufacturing. It's like when other places try to duplicate Silicon Valley, or Hollywood. I've read about this for 40 years, yet no one has made any significant inroads.

Why? The infrastructure. In Hollywood, for example, it isn't just about the physical act of making the movie - get a camera, some lights, bank you are done. There's a whole infrastructure - accountants that only work in the film industry, caterers that specialize in it, mobile dressing room companies, prop companies, movie animal companies, lawyers specializing only in movies. Advertisors, product placement specialists, casting companies, photographers for headshots, agents - the list is truly endless but it all works together in a symphony because everyone knows everyone and how the machine works.

I've lived in Silicon Valley for a long time, and it is out of the world how the entire SF Bay area - and especially San Jose to Palo Alto is geared to tech. Two world-class universities - Stanford and UC Berkeley, and other schools - San Jose State, SF State, East Bay, University of Santa Clara, University of San Francisco - and more - all contribute talent to Silicon Valley. It's literally everywhere, it is almost inescapable.

Hollywood's been there for more than 100 years, Silicon Valley for a long time.

Or like Delaware and corporations - I've read in depth about them and it's the same - their infrastructure and ecosystem is the geared towards corporations. Too long to go into.
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The same is true for Taiwan's chip industry. It is impossible to duplicate, even in the USA. They have the same infrastructure that I've read about. Anyone can go down to xyz nanometers, but go farther than that, and no.

For example, the Dutch company ASML, a $350 billion 37-year-old company with 31,000 highly specialized staff, is the ONLY firm in the world that can make the most advanced chips and Taiwan semiconductor companies buy their machinery to make chips. USA could put incredible pressure on that company not to sell to China, and that would be yet another completely different technology that China would have to develop, but by then, if they could even do that, technology would have improved and China would always be behind the curve. Here's the thing - they make $350 billion by selling to VERY fewe clients - TSMC, Samsung, Intel. Each machine has over 100,000 specialized components. It takes 40 fright containers or four jumbo jets to ship one. In 2020, it sold 31 of them. Trump did stop sales of them to China, and Biden is continuing this policy. ASML has 4,000 suppliers, and those suppliers have suppliers.

Their mirrors, for example, are made by German firm Zeiss in partnership with ASML and they’re the flattest structures humans have ever made.

In the 1960s and 1970s, they used a regular lightbulb to create wafers. Now they have carbon dioxide lasaers that is 400,000 degrees F in temperature. The process to make it took 30 years.

It’s an insane process to ship them and there’s a big learning process to get them up and running because the machines are so complicated. They’re not like an off the shelf, plug it in, turn it on and go. You need to be able to train the staff that are operating them. ASML staff is at every site that there is a machine. ASML is planning to release a next generation machine called High-NA, which stands for high numerical aperture, around 2025.

ASML’s headquarters is in Veldhoven, Netherlands - home to around 45,000 people and thousands of ASML employees, for full assembly. And all those people there and in the surrounding area, who don't work directly at ASML, work for companies that work for ASML, and all part of the ecosystem that supports ASML.