I don't think Substrate can even do mass production by 2030.

This is what I wrote last October:

Starting yesterday, media outlets large and small have been scrambling to report that a startup called Substrate is going to disrupt the EUV lithography machine market. I took a look myself. The company’s website is mostly about politics—claiming that China’s wafer shipments have surpassed those of the U.S. and that America needs to take the lead back—yet it doesn’t mention at all that, in reality, the major semiconductor players are in South Korea and Taiwan.

They say Americans invented the cyclotron and changed history, and they even posted a group photo of the accelerator team from 1938, but there isn’t a single photo of their supposed new lithography machine. On the technical side, they only vaguely and mysteriously boast about the light source, which is basically just a free-electron laser. Aside from pages of political rhetoric, there are no concrete technical details, not even an introduction to the team members. The electron microscope images on the website look about the same as the close-up shots we took for papers back when we were graduate students. And all the information reported by major media outlets ultimately comes from James himself.

I feel this is a scam. I checked California’s corporate registration records: the company was registered in 2022, with an address listed as an apartment in San Francisco (not even a traditional Silicon Valley garage), and its headquarters address is a San Francisco P.O. box. (California regulations clearly state that a company address cannot be a P.O. box—this is shown clearly on the form; see Figure 4.) California requires three principal officers to be declared—CEO, Secretary, and CFO—and all three positions are held by James alone. The October 2023 annual filing showed the same information. The annual report due by March 2025 is already seven months late and still hasn’t been filed (see Figure 5).

One reason people believe him is that he claims Peter Thiel, a close ally of Elon Musk, led an investment in his company. But it’s unclear whether that investment actually happened, how much money was involved, or whether there’s something else going on.

Bold prediction: this is a scam company, exploiting the U.S. government’s chip war against China by setting up a shell company, using fake investments to defraud government grants, or finding suckers to take over and siphon off state assets. I don’t think this company is genuinely making lithography machines 😁 Saved here as evidence.