[jnaina]

Hmm, isn't manufacturing the elephant in the room here. What am I missing. The HC1 is built on TSMC’s N6 process with an 815 mm² die. TSMC’s capacity is already heavily allocated to major customers such as NVIDIA, AMD, Apple, and Qualcomm.

A startup cannot easily secure large wafer volumes because foundry allocation is typically driven by long term revenue commitments. the supply side cannot scale quickly. Building new foundry capacity takes many years. TSMC’s Arizona fab has been under development since 2021 and is still not producing at scale. Samsung’s Texas fab and Intel’s Ohio project face similar long timelines. Expanding semiconductor production requires massive construction, EUV equipment from ASML, yield tuning, and specialized workforce training.

Even if demand for hardwired AI chips surged, the manufacturing ecosystem would take close to a decade to respond.

[pants2]

If the hardwired chips are magnitudes faster couldn't they be manufactured on an older process and still be competitive?

[jnaina]

older processes would not be feasible due to hard physics constraint: die size. The weights have to physically fit on the chip. At 6nm, an 8B parameter model already takes up 815mm², which is roughly the maximum size for any process. At 28nm, that same model would require a chip roughly 20x larger in area, which is physically impossible on a single die. So older nodes work fine for very small edge-case models (think embedded AI, IoT, voice assistants), but anything resembling a capable LLM needs at least N6/N7-class density just to fit.

Talaas' best case exit scenario is to get bought out by Intel, AMD, Qualcomm or Nvidia, and even automotive chip guys like NXP (automotive/robotics offline use will likely be major area of application for this). if the Taalas HC1 Technology Demonstrator is actually working and producing the results they are publicly claiming, I'm assuming there is a steady stream of visitors from silicon valley and elsewhere at their toronto offices.