NVIDIA Doesn’t Make Its Own Chips

Follow a GPU from a room full of engineers, to a file, to an island off the Chinese coast, to the one Dutch company that makes the machine that prints it.

The five companies get named. Synopsys and Cadence make the chip designable, TSMC makes it manufacturable, ASML makes frontier manufacturing possible at all, Broadcom makes thousands of chips behave like one machine, and NVIDIA makes the result usable. The numbers are the argument: one lithography machine costs around 200 million dollars, weighs 180 tons, takes 40 containers and three 747s to ship, and about 50 exist a year. For anyone who follows model launches and has never looked underneath them.