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by groundhogday3 1635 days ago
I've read that takes 2 years to get a new semi-conductor fab up and running. While demand for GPUs has skyrocketed not only in crypto but in other areas.

Couple that with us going into 2 years of global lockdowns and subsequent supply disruptions have probably exacerbated the situation greatly.

1 comments

It takes two years under normal circumstances; from what I understand backlogs for the lithography equipment are a huge bottleneck in the industry since there are only a few companies that make such specialized machines. They were already backordered for years pre-pandemic, with most of those getting pushed out because of supply constraint issues.

We’re never going to return to the level of industrial output pre-Covid. There are a dozen high-likelihood scenarios down the pipe in the 2020s (Russia, China/Taiwan, climate drought / famine, etc) that will continue holding global productivity down. We’re looking at global stagflation for most of the rest of our lives as a result, meaning crypto is a good hedge. NVidia just needs to start pricing its top-tier GPUs for crypto farms, then refurbishing the last generation for consumers when the crypto farms upgrade.

If Ethereum moves to PoS, half the crypto GPU market goes poof in an instant. Not a good thing to hedge more chip fabs on, I would bet.
It will move from one to another coin and profitability will decrease slightly unless supply induces demand.