No. I don’t know where this oft-repeated semiconductor meme came from, but it’s a really poor take.
ASML are solving a small subset of physics problems: how to project extremely small features. TSMC are solving many more physics problems: how to structure layers of doped silicon into transistors, how to structure those transistors into logic gates, and those logic gates into functional blocks. This is why silicon process is not just a matter of capital investment, and why nobody is going to show up overnight with 10 billion dollars and change things. It’s not that TSMC are the only ones with a big bag of cash to give ASML.
Yeah I love how people thinks it's easy to mass produce designs that take hundreds of individual steps and weeks for a single wafer to go through the process. 50+ Layers, aligned at the (sub?) nanometer level. Trying to tweak the process so that your electrons stop quantum tunneling across layers in all directions.
ASML are solving a small subset of physics problems: how to project extremely small features. TSMC are solving many more physics problems: how to structure layers of doped silicon into transistors, how to structure those transistors into logic gates, and those logic gates into functional blocks. This is why silicon process is not just a matter of capital investment, and why nobody is going to show up overnight with 10 billion dollars and change things. It’s not that TSMC are the only ones with a big bag of cash to give ASML.