South Korea's two semiconductor giants confirmed Monday they will liquidate a historic sum of capital to successfully arrange a microscopic handful of silicon particles into slightly tighter rectangles.
Samsung Electronics Co. and SK Hynix Inc. are preparing to announce a massive joint investment of hundreds of billions of dollars to fund the successful placement of four to six extra subatomic particles onto a 2-nanometer wafer, industry sources confirmed Monday.
The historic capital expenditure, driven by intense global competition in the artificial intelligence sector, will allow engineers at both firms to construct state-of-the-art fabrication facilities dedicated entirely to physically forcing previously comfortable electrons into an agonizingly cramped microscopic grid.
The current AI boom demands that we spend the equivalent of a mid-sized nation's gross domestic product just to make a single square millimeter of sand marginally better at guessing the next word in a sentence.
According to advance reports in South Korean media, SK Hynix will direct its share of the funding toward its high-bandwidth memory division. The company plans to build a 400-acre cleanroom complex that will consume enough electricity to power the city of Busan, all to ensure that a distant server rack in Virginia can generate a synthetic image of a dog riding a skateboard 0.4 milliseconds faster.
Samsung, meanwhile, will dedicate over $200 billion to purchasing next-generation extreme ultraviolet lithography machines from Dutch manufacturer ASML. The multi-ton, bus-sized machines will be used to shoot lasers at microscopic droplets of tin, carving invisible trenches into brittle discs that executives promise will yield a 3 percent increase in smartphone battery life for users passively scrolling through social media feeds.