You need to look at the heart of the $400 million machine

The mysterious ASML machine costs $400 million, and the companies that make GPUs I can’t function without the machine. There is no AI without a GPU, and there is currently no economy without the concept of AI absorbing investors’ money and use it to disconcertingly create businesses, expand them and direct an entire economic activity of dubious morality and even more dubious utility that we all may not like, but which sustains us. For now.

A new 55-minute YouTube video is the most in-depth, lucid explanation I’ve ever consumed of the $400 machine – ASML’s colossal EUV lithography system – how and why this technology was designed, and pretty much how it works. It is created by Veritasium, the YouTube channel of science influencer Derek Muller, who just under 20 million subscriberswhich seems like a lot until you compare it to MrBeast’s 458 million. This is a powerful, but relatively niche, channel, big enough to gain access to an ASML clean room, but still probably close to the popularity ceiling for a channel dealing with fairly hard science.

As of this writing, the video is doing impressive business, reaching ten million views, even though it’s about, well, ultraviolet lithography. Luckily, it avoids most of the usual corn syrup that taints your average fucking epic science video. He doesn’t treat his audience like children. He wasn’t injected with a bunch of “this just happened” jokes. The vibe is that the creators of the video respect their viewers and sincerely want them to leave more informed than they were when they started.

Will you actually be more informed than before watching the video? For my part, I’m not sure I deserve Veritasium’s respect. The audience stand-in is a guy named Casper Mebius, and he responds to a guy from ASML talking about the wavelength of a red laser being 650 nanometers by saying “something like that, yeah.” I can’t understand this 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 nevertheless look at the heart of the $400 machine. You must contemplate the supernatural softness of mirrors. You need to hear in detail how the tin droplets drip and are lasered, and how they emit supernova light. You have to try, and fail, to truly understand laser precision thought experiments involving aiming dimes at the moon. More importantly: you get to watch the relatively crude, jerky dance of the GPU wafers themselves being lithographed inside the machine.

It used to be very important to those in power in the United States that China will never harness the full power of the GPU. But keeping China away from cutting-edge chips seems to lose priority lately. A few weeks ago, it emerged that a Chinese team from Shenzhen had, by poaching ASML employees, created a prototype of the $400 million machine. It is haunting to contemplate what all this might portend.

The $400 machine will one day no longer be the crown jewel of the tech economy. Moore’s Law will continue, processor power will continue to increase, and the $400 million machine will become electronic waste like everything else. The $1 billion machine is not far away. Watch this one while it still means something.