TSMC, Intel, and Samsung had financial positions that were strong enough to roll the dice and hope they could make EUV work. GlobalFoundries decided that as a medium-sized foundry, it could never make a 7nm process financially viable. It announced it would stop building ever-smaller transistors, slashed R&D spending by a third, and quickly turned a profit after several years of losses. Building cutting-edge processors was too expensive for everyone except the world’s biggest chipmakers. Even the deep pockets of the Persian Gulf royals who owned GlobalFoundries weren’t deep enough. The number
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