A riveting 55-minute YouTube video will show you where the GPU wafers come from.
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.
