Manufacturing Microchips: The Ultimate Challenge

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Creating microchips involves etching lines as narrow as three nanometers, comparable to the rate at which a fingernail grows in the time it takes to say a sentence. A chip in a new smartphone can contain 10 to 20 billion tiny transistors, each the size of half a coronavirus. The process of manufacturing these chips is incredibly challenging, requiring precision and complexity beyond any other human-made item. The intricacy involved in producing billions of coronavirus-sized devices on a single chip is unparalleled in the manufacturing industry.

Beneath the race to train and release more powerful AI models lies another race: a race by companies and nation-states to secure the hardware to make sure they win AI supremacy.

Correction: The latest available Nvidia chip is the Hopper H100 GPU, which has 80 billion transistors. Since the first commercially available chip had four transistors, the Hopper actually has 20 billion times that number. Nvidia recently announced the Blackwell, which boasts 208 billion transistors - but it won’t ship until later this year.

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