How it works
The machines and ideas behind the companies on this site, one interactive explainer at a time. Each one plays itself as a tour, and turns into a guide the moment you touch it.
- Part 1 How EUV lithography prints a chip Twelve steps from a droplet of molten tin to a printed layer of silicon, inside a 3D model of ASML's scanner. Why the industry needed 13.5-nanometre light, why there are no lenses, and why only one company can build the machine.
- Part 2 How a GPU works A gallery of eleven exhibits: a CPU and a GPU racing, the package and its memory stacks, the die, one streaming multiprocessor magnified, a tensor core multiplying matrices, number formats, HBM pulled apart, the memory ladder, a rack, and the plumbing that cools it.
- Part 3 A wafer's three months in the fab From a crystal pulled out of molten silicon to a tested die leaving for packaging: the cleanroom hall and its overhead carriers, the transistors built layer by layer in a magnified cross-section, the patterning loop that runs a hundred times, deposition, etch, implant, polishing, fifteen levels of copper, inspection and wafer sort.
- Part 4 How a language model works What all that silicon is for. Twelve steps from a sentence to the next token: tokens and embeddings, attention, the layers where the facts live, pretraining on trillions of words, the post-training that makes an assistant, why inference is memory-bound, and what still goes wrong. Hover a word to watch it decide what to read, and generate text one token at a time with a temperature dial.
- Part 5 How 100,000 GPUs talk The layer with the most new public companies and the least explanation. Eleven exhibits: eight GPUs waiting on a straggler, the NVLink switches on an HGX board, the NVL72 rack and its copper spine, scale-up against scale-out, a network card that skips the CPU, InfiniBand against Ethernet under the same burst, a transceiver pulled apart, the fibre between halls, co-packaged optics, the three-tier fat tree, and the ring all-reduce it all exists for.
- Part 6 The data centre A gigawatt campus from the substation to the cold plate. The power coming in at 345,000 volts, the batteries and generators, why a rack went from 10 kW to 120 kW, where the gigawatt actually goes, why air stopped working, the cold plates and the CDU, where the water goes, and where the power comes from.