Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology

by Chris Miller

GlobalFoundries was giving up production of new, cutting-edge nodes. It wouldn’t pursue a 7nm process based on EUV lithography, which had already cost $1.5 billion in development and would have required a comparable amount of additional spending to bring online. 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 of companies capable of fabricating leading-edge logic chips fell from four to three.