The National EUV Accelerator comes to Albany

https://research.ibm.com/blog/euv-center-albany-nstc

43 45 2 years ago

research.ibm.com

jmclnx• 2 years ago

In this day and time, I'll believe it when it really happens. Depending on what happens next week, the CHIPS act could be repealed early next year.

parpfish2• 2 years ago

What’s the status of IBM these days? They are treated like an obsolete dinosaur in my tech circles, but they’re so big that I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that they are actually cutting edge in some areas (particularly in capital intensive stuff)

matmatmatmat• 2 years ago

I can't speak to most of what they do, but they seem to be at the forefront of quantum computing.

Hikikomori• 2 years ago

Afaik they're partnered with Samsung on the fab side.

TechDebtDevin3• 2 years ago

They placed all their bets on enterprise cloud + Quantum.

grugagag2• 2 years ago

Azure and AWS?

KK7NIL2• 2 years ago

Their semiconductor IP division has been cutting edge for decades (particularly before TSMC got copper working).

They kind of act like a bridge between academia and industry, helping to develop academic ideas into something that's viable for high volume manufacturing.

nxobject3• 2 years ago

Did the sale of their semi fabs effect the IP side of the business?

Zigurd• 2 years ago

IBM has a track record of pursuing highly visible projects, like chip fabs, PowerPC, Watson etc. and then just seemingly wimping out.

greenavocado• 2 years ago

They are low key going wild on AI Agents

parpfish2• 2 years ago

Isn’t that true of almost everybody from startup to FAANG? Watson crushed it on jeopardy 15 years ago, but where did that lead go?

readyplayernull• 2 years ago

There was a recent article about IBM:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41646967

Their goal is to replace staff with AI, although they suck at it:

A WatsonX chatbot is years behind ChatGPT," Blake said. "Its web interface was horribly broken to the point of being unusable until July 2024, and no one in the entire organization uses it.

Retric• 2 years ago

IBM isn’t that big. They are way smaller than trillion dollar companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple, Samsung, Amazon etc.

They may have similar revenue to Intel, but they lack focus. Being so spread out they don’t really dominate any segment. What they are great at is marketing compared to say Accenture which is roughly the same size.

kamranjon• 2 years ago

Forewarning that this is an incredibly biased viewpoint based on my experience with IBM and their products…

They tend to target slower moving clients, think healthcare or the public sector. They sell them incredibly outdated products which tend to wall them in or limit their choices to other similarly outdated product offerings from IBM.

This begins the support racket, it is not uncommon to see an error from an IBM product instructing you to reach out to your IBM support representative for help in resolving the issue. These support agreements are where quite a lot of their money is made.

It goes deeper, many people who previously worked at IBM end up taking software architect positions within these slow-moving sectors. I am not saying it’s outright, but it seems quite obvious that these people are financially motivated to fold IBM products into any and every opportunity possible.

Basically IBM has developed somewhat of a dark pattern for software sales and they use it to capture their clients. Extricating your organization from the IBM ecosystem is incredibly difficult and often an uphill battle.

raverbashing• 2 years ago

Correct

For an organization to remove this, it needs to be treated like a metastasized spread, and every person that has ever touched or supported this needs to be removed from the org

jhbadger• 2 years ago

They are working on quantum computing, so they do have cutting edge tech in some sectors, but as mentioned, they make their money on their rather outdated infrastructure.

walterbell• 2 years ago

https://www.nextplatform.com/2024/10/24/ibms-red-hat-acquisi...

IBM is nearly done getting back the $34 billion that it spent.. to acquire open source software supporter Red Hat.. [which] doubled in size since the acquisition, with an annual run rate of $6.5 billion and delivering a compound annual growth rate “in the mid teens” over those five years.. OpenShift had an annualized run rate of a mere $100 million when IBM took control and is now running at $1.3 billion, a factor of 13X increase over the five years

jonkoops• 2 years ago

Ah yes, the classic block the exports of your partners and throw a bunch of subsidies at your own. Thanks for the free market capitalism America!

ralph84• 2 years ago

Some things are more important than free market capitalism, and making sure you’re not dependent on hostile countries for key technology is one of them.

onepointsixC• 2 years ago

There is no free market in the fab business. Every single player had some level of government support and direct subsidies for decades.

rm_-rf_slash• 2 years ago

Exactly. ICs and Silicon Valley as we know it wouldn’t exist without the space program.

WantonQuantum• 2 years ago

America never claimed to have a completely free market: https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/031815/united-state...

osnium1235• 2 years ago

According to the Oregonian, Intel and Oregon were hoping to land this center.

https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2024/10/biden-admi...

nxobject3• 2 years ago

Yikes - Intel must not carry a lot of currency with federal planners any more. The fact that Oregon hasn't had a Portland-area research institution for decades in semi tech/hardware engineering probably doesn't help, either. [1] (Or the fact that Chuck Schumer represents NY.)

[1] I know people in the 50s who used to work at the Oregon Graduate Institute, which was very adjacent to Tektronix, Intel, etc.

osnium1235• 2 years ago

It was a tragedy for the area when OGI basically vanished. I know a lot of people who earned graduate degrees while working at local companies.

osnium1235• 2 years ago

I suspect that the federal government thinks that Intel will go bankrupt and they don’t want to tie their center to a part of the country without much intellectual capital (no world class universities, etc).

insane_dreamer4• 2 years ago

RPI has a Quantum computer (courtesy of IBM) - the only university to have one I believe - and is a highly respected engineering research university, so that likely played a part in Albany getting this.

I find it surprising that Intel didn't help fund the establishment of a world class research university in Portland, or an OSU or OU satellite focused on engineering.

alephnerd• 2 years ago

Let's see if Albany's NanoTech Complex finally takes off this time.

It's had a fairly cursed history of corruption scandals from the Cuomo era of NY state politics.

If Cuomo hadn't mismanaged NY State's business capacity, this would have taken off a decade earlier - Upstate New York always had the right pieces due to Kodak, Nikon, and IBM Microelectronics-turned-GloFo

sylware• 2 years ago

Good, the US is going serious about EUV tooling (If I understood well). This would be for the american block.

In the EU block, there is ASML.

Now, the asian block should have its own, but I don't know how if china should not R&D its own and asian democraties should stick to the US and EU blocks.

And RISC-V ISA could make a good interop glue for all of them.

But the more I look at it, the more I think the world is getting divided in roughly 2, so maybe the world would need only 2 centers of EUV tooling (or ultra complex tools for state of the art chips): one for the finance dictatorship block ("democraties",EU,US,etc), and one for the harder classic (including religious) dictatorship block (china,russia,etc)

The National EUV Accelerator comes to Albany

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