Thiel-Backed Startup Targets US Chip Comeback

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00:00I've had the benefit of spending some time with you in recent weeks, looking at the company,

00:05seeing the technology. The technical breakthrough is the use of a particle accelerator.

00:10But you're very keen to point out that you didn't take any IP from anyone else or work with another

00:15technology company. The response when we published the story was, how is this different from a

00:20company called Xlight? So take that and run with it, please. I think that what we've shown today

00:27is a working tool that is producing beautiful images. To our knowledge, there's only two

00:35companies that are actually printing images at these resolutions, one in the United States.

00:43Let's bring up those images. You're basically sharing these images as evidence that the machine

00:49itself works. What is it that we're looking at here? And beyond that, I think some of the

00:56technical questions that the analyst community came to us with is, what is the throughput of this

01:01machine? You know, beyond this being a lab-based experiment?

01:06Yeah, so that's a great question. So it's important to know that the images that we've printed,

01:12we've done them under production-like conditions. So this isn't something that is a very long

01:18exposure, a sort of one-off. We've been very, very focused on if we're going to use this kind

01:23of light source. It has to be capable of high volume production. And then on the other side,

01:28the actual tool itself, we have what is a production quality 300 millimeter wafer tool

01:34with the mechatronics in that tool moving at production throughput. Of course, we're not in a

01:40fab. We've not built a fab yet. And so the proof is really going to be there. But we feel very,

01:46very confident that on the key metrics that go into throughput, we've been demonstrating those.

01:51Okay, so you haven't built a fab. You are planning an American foundry. Why, James?

01:56That's, well, if you look at the history of all of this technology, from the transistor to

02:02photolithography itself, the United States invented all of this. It was predominantly actually two

02:07companies, Intel and IBM. And so I see that we have a long history in this country of doing crazy,

02:15bold things. And it feels like a more brief aberration that the United States is not in a

02:22leadership position here. We've gone and done something very, very different on the sort of key

02:27process in the manufacturing process. Our ideas aren't limited just to the lithography. We have

02:33lots of ideas about what would it look like if you were starting a foundry from scratch. And so we're

02:38very excited to go and and keep building on top of that. And I'm sure ASML looks on with wonder is at

02:45the moment they are at the heart of lithography and maybe Japanese player too. But really, they have

02:50the choke point. I'm interested as and when your facility might be up and running for such lithography,

02:56for such semiconductor equipment, making machines to be up and running and producing commercially, James.

03:01Our goal is to be up and running in 2028. It's a very, very fast timeline, but we've moved at

03:08incredible speed. The company's really only three years old at this point. And so if we can continue

03:13at that pace, we think that we can get that done. James, for you, this is about American sovereignty

03:21over a national security critical technology. Would you just explain your pitch in those terms? I know

03:29that you are driven by a very specific ideology on how and why America should lead in this field.

03:36Yeah, to be very clear, like you said, like this company and starting this, this is a very

03:42ideologically driven mission. Doing this and starting this is not easy. It's been incredibly,

03:48incredibly hard to get to this point. But I feel like the national security and economic security

03:55imperative, we need to be doing absolutely everything that we possibly can to get the

04:00United States back into a leadership position. We need to be building as many fabs from domestic and

04:05foreign players as we possibly can. My number one goal is wafers built in the United States. We think that

04:12we can do a different version of that and bring that online very rapidly. But the end goal is

04:17semiconductors built in the United States as quickly as possible.

04:20In the story, we outline both that you were once a UK citizen who renounced UK citizenship and became

04:29an American citizen and that you have no intention to sell these machines. So I want to get to some

04:33subject matter that we didn't cover. You know that you need to raise tens of billions of dollars probably

04:39to achieve this vision. The capital right now is coming from the Gulf in the Middle East. How would

04:45you manage that situation? So I think it's actually really important to note that traditionally with a

04:52large semiconductor fab, you need a very, very large anchor customer to be able to fund the sort of tens

04:59of billions required to get a fab up and running. But with what we're doing, we can actually reduce those

05:05costs so that to bring up a low volume facility, you'd only really be in the single digit, low single

05:11digit billions of dollars. And so because of that, we think that we have a lot more flexibility in

05:16raising capital and actually getting this build as quickly as we can.

05:20So maybe keep on depending on US capital to build and fabricate in the United States. And for that,

05:28how much have you had to liaise with the Trump administration? How much have you had to be in

05:31sync with their own focus on fabrication in the United States?

05:36Well, I think the Trump administration and the president have have made it very clear.

05:40They see that this is a golden age for the United States and that we are in a in a technological

05:46battle. There's an AI race in the United States needs to win. And so from from literally day one

05:51of that administration, they've been incredibly supportive, engaged and and the door has always

05:57been open. And so we we're incredible fans of the administration and appreciative of the time

06:03that they've given us.

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