You Must Stare Into the Heart of the $400 Million Machine

The mysterious ASML machine costs $400 million, and the companies that make GPUs can’t function without the machine. There’s no AI without the GPUs, and there’s currently no economy without the concept of AI absorbing investor money and using it to unnervingly build companies and expand them and drive all the questionably moral and even more questionably useful economic activity that we all may not like, but which sustains us. For the time being.

A new 55-minute YouTube video is the most in-depth and lucid explanation I’ve ever consumed about the $400 machine—ASML’s colossal EUV lithography system—how and why this technology was conceived, and roughly how it works. It’s created by Veritasium, the YouTube channel of science influencer Derek Muller, which has just shy of 20 million subscribers, which sounds like a lot until you compare it to MrBeast’s 458 million. It’s a powerful, but relatively niche channel, prominent enough to gain access to an ASML clean room, but probably nonetheless close to the ceiling of popularity for a channel about fairly hard science.

As of this writing, the video was doing impressive business, pushing ten million views, even though it’s about, well, ultraviolet lithography. Fortunately it sidesteps most of the usual corn syrup that taints your average freaking epic science video. It doesn’t treat its audience like children. It hasn’t been injected with a bunch of “that just happened” jokes. The vibe is that the makers of the video respect their viewers and genuinely want them to come away more knowledgeable than they were when they started.

Will you actually be more knowledgeable than you were before you watched the video? Speaking for myself, I’m not sure I deserve Veritasium’s respect. The audience stand-in is a guy named Casper Mebius, and he responds to an ASML guy talking about the wavelength of a red laser being 650 nanometers by going “something like that, yeah.” I can’t relate to that at all. I would have said “if you say so.” Maybe I deserved the Miss Rachel version of this video.

But you, like me, must nonetheless stare into the heart of the $400 machine. You must behold the otherworldly smoothness of the mirrors. You must hear, in detail, how the tin droplets are dripped and laser blasted, and how they emit the light of a supernova. You must try, and fail, to truly wrap your head around the thought experiments about laser accuracy involving aiming at dimes on the moon. Most importantly: you must watch the comparatively crude, herky-jerky dance of the GPU wafers themselves getting lithography-ed inside the machine. 

It was once very important to the people in power in the U.S. that China not ever harness the full power of the GPU. But keeping China away from cutting edge chips seems to be getting de-prioritized lately. A few weeks ago, it emerged that a Chinese team in Shenzhen had, by poaching ASML employees, created a prototype of the $400 million machine. It’s haunting to contemplate what this all might portend.

The $400 machine will one day no longer be the crown jewel of the tech economy. Moore’s law will march on, processor power will keep inflating, and the $400 million machine will become e-waste like everything else. The $1 billion machine is not far away. Stare into this one while it still means something.