Thiel-Backed Startup Targets US Chip Comeback

Key Takeaways

I've had the benefit of spending some time with you in recent weeks looking at the company, seeing the technology. The technical breakthrough is the use of a particle accelerator, but you're very keen to point out that you didn't take any IP from anyone else or work with another technology company. The response when we published the story was, "How is this different from a company called Xite?" So, take that and run with it, please. I think that what we've shown today is a working tool that is producing beautiful images. Um to our knowledge, there's only two companies that are actually printing images at this these resolutions uh uh in one in the United States. >> Let's bring up those images. You're basically sharing these images as evidence that the the machine itself works. What is it that we're looking at here? Um and you know beyond that I think some of the the technical questions that the analyst community came to us with is what is the throughput of this machine you know beyond this being a a lab-based experiment. >> Yeah. So that's a great question. So it's important to know that the images that we've printed printed we've done them under production like conditions. So this isn't something that is a very long exposure a sort of oneoff. We've been very very focused on if we're going to use this kind of light source, it has to be capable of high volume production. And then on the other side, the actual tool itself, we have what is a production quality 300 mm wafer tool with the mechatronics in that tool moving at production throughput. Of course, we're not in a fab. We've not built a fab yet. And so the the the the proof is really going to be there. But we feel very very confident that on the key metrics that go into throughput, we've been demonstrating those. >> Okay. So you haven't built a fab you are planning an American foundry. Why James? >> That's well if you look at the history of all of this technology from the transistor to photoiththography itself, the United States invented all of this. It was predominantly actually two companies Intel and IBM. And so I see that we have a long history in this country of doing crazy bold things and and it and it feels like a more brief uh aberration that the United States is not in a leadership position here. We've gone and done something very very different on the the sort of key process in the manufacturing process. Our ideas aren't limited just to the lithography. We have lots of ideas about what would it look like if you were starting a foundry from scratch. And so we're very excited to go and and and keep building on top of that >> and I'm sure ASML looks on with wonder as at the moment they are at the heart of lithography and maybe Japanese player too but really they have the choke point. I'm interested as and when your facility might be up and running for such lithography for such semiconductor equipment making machines to be up and running and producing commercially. James >> our goal is to be up and running in 2028. It's a very very fast timeline, but we've moved at incredible speed. The company's really only three years old at this point. And so if we can continue at that pace, we think that we can get that done. James, for you, this is about American sovereignty over a national security critical technology. Would you just explain your pitch in those terms? I know that you are driven by a very specific ideology on how and why America should lead in this field. >> Yeah. The the to to be very clear like you said like this company and starting this this is a very ideologically driven mission. Doing this and starting this is is not easy. It's been incredibly incredibly hard to get to this point. But I feel like the the the the the national security and economic security imperative, we need to be doing absolutely everything that we possibly can to get the United States back into a leadership position. We need to be building as many fabs from domestic and foreign um players as we possibly can. My my number one goal is wafers built in the United States. We we think that we can do a different version of that and bring that online very rapidly. But the the end goal is semiconductors built in the United States as quickly as possible. >> In the story, we we we we outline both that you were once a UK citizen who renounced UK citizenship and became an American citizen and that you have no intention to sell these machines. So I want to get to some subject that matter that we didn't cover. you know that you need to raise tens of billions of dollars probably to achieve this vision. The capital right now is coming from the Gulf in the Middle East. How would you manage that situation? >> So I think it's actually really important to note that traditionally with a large semiconductor fab, you need a very very large anchor customer to be able to fund the sort of tens of billions required to get a a fab up and running. But with with what we're doing, we can actually reduce those costs. So that to bring up a low volume facility, you'd only really be in the the single digit low singledigit billions of dollars. And so because of that, we think that we have a lot more flexibility in raising capital and actually getting this built as quickly as we can. >> So maybe keep on depending on US capital to build and fabricate in the United States. And for that, how much have you had to leaz with the Trump administration? How much have you had to be in sync with their own focus on fabrication in the United States? >> Well, I think the Trump administration and the president have have made it very clear. They see that this is a golden age for the United States and that we are in a in a in a a technological battle. There's an AI race and the United States needs to win. And so from from literally day one of that administration, they've been incredibly supportive, engaged, and and the door has always been open. And so, um, we we we're incredible fans of the administration and and appreciative of the time that they've given