The AI Boom is Straining the Semiconductor Industry

The demand for powerful AI chips is growing exponentially.

For the last decade, chip manufacturing has hit a wall—getting smaller and faster now means getting much more expensive. New manufacturing equipment, like high-NA EUV machines, costs over $400 million, making innovation prohibitively expensive for many.

This chart illustrates this trend perfectly. For decades, the cost per transistor consistently dropped, then stalled for ten years. We are now at a crucial inflection point where manufacturing the next generation of chips is more expensive, fundamentally changing the economics of the entire tech industry.