--- title: "Lithography: what it means · The AI Compute Race · DRYBURGH" source: https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/lithography description: "Lithography: The printing of a chip's circuits. The finest patterns are printed by EUV machines. Chapter 4." --- # Lithography What does “Lithography” mean? LithographyThe printing of a chip’s circuits. The finest patterns are printed by EUV machines. *Chapter 4.* From *The AI Compute Race*. [Read the book](https://dryburgh.com/vol1#buy) ## Where the book uses it - [Chapter 4 — One Rack](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/notes/chapter-4)How a datacenter is actually built, from a converted factory in Memphis to a greenfield campus in Texas, and what the clock from first ground to first power really measures. ## Sources that use it - Chris Miller, *Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology* (Scribner, 2022) (the choke-point arithmetic Miller printed in 2022, on 2019 data: Taiwan 37 percent of what he called the world’s new computing power, a share of logic wafer capacity in the report his note cites; two Korean firms 44 percent of memory; ASML 100 percent of EUV lithography — “OPEC’s 40 percent share of world oil production looks unimpressive by comparison”; an advanced logic fab “costs twice as much as an aircraft carrier but will only be cutting-edge for a couple of years”; the foreign-direct-product rule against Huawei, which Miller dates to May 2020 though its reach to any chip sold to Huawei is the rule of August 2020 — any chip made anywhere with US technology requires US permission; a former senior official afterward: “Weaponized interdependence… It’s a beautiful thing”; TSMC founded 1987 with the state providing 48 percent of the capital — “a project of the Taiwanese state”; on EUV: “wasn’t globalized, it was monopolized” (ch. 32, “Lithography Wars”, its last paragraph); on the industry’s paradox, a U.S. semiconductor executive to a White House official: “Our fundamental problem is that our number one customer is our number one competitor” (ch. 49, Everything We’re Competing On); Introduction, of the choke points: “No other facet of the economy is so dependent on so few firms”). Also ch. “The Next Offset”: “One Chinese study has estimated that as many as 95 percent of GPUs in Chinese servers running artificial intelligence workloads are designed by Nvidia” — a cited study’s figure, which the study itself (CAICT, 2021, p. 15) gives as about 95 percent of China’s AI-server market in 2020, a market share and a central figure, not an upper bound, not Miller’s own count (the “in the car with us” line is Matt Turpin’s argument as Miller reports it; the 95 percent figure is a Chinese study Miller cites; Miller’s endnote dates the 37 percent to 2019 Semiconductor Industry Association data and sources the 44 percent to the same report). [In the Sources](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/sources/book#chip-war-miller) ## Related terms - [EUV](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/euv) - [TeraFab](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/terafab) - [122 days](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/122-days) - [Abilene](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/abilene) - [Accelerator](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/accelerator) - [Blackwell](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/blackwell) - [Colossus](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/colossus) - [CPU](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/cpu) - [GB200 NVL72](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/gb200-nvl72) - [GB300](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/gb300) - [GPU](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/gpu) - [Greenfield](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/greenfield) From the glossary of The AI Compute Race. - [Campuses](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/ledger) - [Tests](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/tests) - [Scorecard](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/scorecard) - [Data](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/data/releases) - [Chapter by chapter](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/companion) - [The record at a glance](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/observatory) - [The machine](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/machine) - [One campus, four futures](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/hyperion) - [Glossary](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary) - [People](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/people) - [Sources](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/sources) - [Notes](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/notes) - [Where the book was wrong](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/corrections) - [Where its sources were wrong](https://dryburgh.com/corrections?book=vol1) - [The Paper](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/paper) - [Consent](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/consent) - [Who builds and pays](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/parties) *The AI Compute Race: Five Races, One Machine* is a book by Lee S. Dryburgh, the first volume of THE COMPUTE ECONOMY, published by Dryburgh, an imprint of Contestra OÜ, Tallinn, Estonia; its record closes on 8 November 2026. [About the book](https://dryburgh.com/vol1)[Tell me when it is out](https://dryburgh.com/vol1#notify)