{
 "id": "1.10",
 "slug": "silicon-wafers",
 "url": "/parts/compute-silicon-and-packaging/silicon-wafers",
 "name": "Silicon wafers",
 "qualifiers": null,
 "layer": {
  "id": 1,
  "name": "Compute silicon & packaging"
 },
 "parent_id": null,
 "children": [],
 "summary": "The raw silicon wafers that foundries process into finished chips, produced by a small group of specialty wafer manufacturers.",
 "description_md": "Silicon wafers are the physical substrate every chip in this layer starts from, sold to the advanced-node foundry step before any transistor is patterned onto them. It's a raw-materials position upstream of essentially the entire rest of the layer — every merchant GPU, custom ASIC, CPU, NIC, and DPU chip design traces back to a wafer order from one of a handful of specialty producers, most of them concentrated in Japan, Taiwan, Germany, and Korea.\nThe investor case here is a volume and specification story rather than a differentiation story: wafer demand tracks foundry wafer starts, and AI accelerator dies, being larger and more complex than typical logic chips, add incremental pressure on the most advanced wafer specifications even when unit counts alone wouldn't suggest tight supply. Supplier concentration is high and the qualification bar for a new wafer supplier at an advanced node is steep, so this tends to be a stable, long-cycle relationship business rather than one with frequent competitive displacement.",
 "ai_delta": "Wafer demand rises directly with foundry wafer starts for AI accelerators, and the larger, more complex AI dies add further pressure on the most advanced wafer specifications.",
 "bottleneck_status": null,
 "scale_tiers": [
  "enterprise",
  "hyperscale_building",
  "ai_campus",
  "gw_class"
 ],
 "density_modes": [
  "any"
 ],
 "scale_notes": "Wafer starts scale with total foundry capacity booked across all customers industry-wide, not with any single data center's size.",
 "flow": [
  "compute"
 ],
 "companies": [
  {
   "company_id": "globalwafers",
   "name": "GlobalWafers",
   "role": "manufacturer",
   "confidence": "inferred",
   "ownership_type": "public",
   "ticker": "6488.TWO",
   "product_note": null,
   "note": null,
   "source_url": null
  },
  {
   "company_id": "shin-etsu",
   "name": "Shin-Etsu",
   "role": "manufacturer",
   "confidence": "inferred",
   "ownership_type": "public",
   "ticker": "4063.T",
   "product_note": null,
   "note": null,
   "source_url": null
  },
  {
   "company_id": "siltronic",
   "name": "Siltronic",
   "role": "manufacturer",
   "confidence": "inferred",
   "ownership_type": "public",
   "ticker": "WAF.DE",
   "product_note": null,
   "note": null,
   "source_url": null
  },
  {
   "company_id": "sk-siltron",
   "name": "SK Siltron",
   "role": "manufacturer",
   "confidence": "inferred",
   "ownership_type": "subsidiary",
   "ticker": null,
   "product_note": null,
   "note": null,
   "source_url": null
  },
  {
   "company_id": "sumco",
   "name": "SUMCO",
   "role": "manufacturer",
   "confidence": "inferred",
   "ownership_type": "public",
   "ticker": "3436.T",
   "product_note": null,
   "note": null,
   "source_url": null
  }
 ]
}