Why leading-edge fabs are a chokepoint

Leading-edge chipmaking may be the most capital-intensive manufacturing on Earth. A single advanced fab costs on the order of $20–30 billion, and the machines at its heart — extreme-ultraviolet (EUV) lithography systems — are made by exactly one company, ASML, each unit costing hundreds of millions. That economics is why the frontier has narrowed to essentially three logic players (TSMC, Samsung, Intel) plus a memory tier, with China's SMIC held back by lack of EUV access.

The result is a genuine global chokepoint. Almost every AI accelerator, phone and advanced weapon depends on a handful of fabs, mostly clustered in a few locations — which is why governments now treat leading-edge capacity as strategic infrastructure and pour subsidies into it. The capex metric on this tracker is the clearest sign of that barrier: only firms that can spend ~$40B a year stay at the front.

We track capex and market share alongside the node because the frontier is as much about who can afford to stay there as about the physics. When the cost of the next node rises faster than revenue, the field consolidates further — and the chokepoint tightens.