The Chip Insider®– Moore's Law is dead. Long live Moore's Law

Anybody who has known me over the past 40-plus years knows that I have always been a champion of Moore’s Law... So, if I’m claiming Moore’s Law is dead, it’s probably true… But first, let’s define what Moore’s Law is, as most get it wrong. The law is about far more than a simple … scaling… Gordon saw this future as the law of supply and demand, where lower prices would create new demand.

Why Moore’s Law is dead: The areal cost of a wafer is rising faster than the rate of density increase from scaling due to increasing process complexity…

Long live Moore's Law… There is always a prince in waiting to take the place of the dead king. Since it is Carver Mead who coined the term ‘Moore’s Law,’ I’ll refer to something he told … the IEEE Spectrum: “The Moore’s Law thing is really about people’s belief in the future and their willingness to put energy into causing that thing to come about.” Carver was really describing a process of Emergent Behavior leading to a Virtuous Cycle, as laid out in this SPIE Advanced Lithography 2018 plenary talk. Essentially, the part of Moore’s Law that’s dead is using scaling to drive cost.

The new Moore’s Law is about using scaling and material systems engineering to drive up value...

The rise of AI and the Data Center: Anyone looking at the “3Q25 Revenue by Platform” slide in TSMC’s earnings call should have been shocked by the imbalance: HPC, which is largely AI and Data Center demand, accounted for 57% of revenues… Semiconductors account for roughly 50% of the value in a data center... Another change agent here in the smartphone to AI wafer demand question is chip size and yield… What about AI demand? Where is it? I would argue that the inference part of the AI wave is already on the way. When Google Gemini was launched in 2024, they delivered 9.7T tokens in April. A year later, that number had grown at a 4848% CAGR to 480TpM. By … Most recently it reached 1400 TpM… The point is that AI is now more than a science experiment of training chips to be intelligent. There is real demand for the value the new Moore’s Law can bring.

"Strategy requires a sense of the whole that reveals the significance of respective parts.” — John Lewis Gaddis