Jen Yang-Wong

Anna-Sofia Lesiv

Eric Tarczynski

James Hennessy

Kyle Harrison

Jessica Retrum

Contrary HQ

Jason Chen

Will Robbins

The world's supply chain today runs on tech developed a generation ago. Although it gets the job done — a stunning 77% of all transactions globally touch an SAP system — the modern economy demands efficiency that can only come with better integration and intelligence.

The Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) market is perhaps the largest and stickiest software market in existence, but also the least innovative. Integrating with an ERP is brutal. Data is stored on-prem, not in the cloud. Users working in a warehouse, for example, may need to make 10 clicks to execute simple updates that should take 3. It's also nearly impossible to derive basic business insights.

If a startup could build a modern, cloud-based ERP for the 21st Century, the sky would be the limit. This is exactly why we're excited to invest in Recurrency.

Recurrency is an ERP Automation company that has been three generations in the making. CEO Sam Oshay's grandfather immigrated to America in search of a better life and built Huntington Hardware, a door and lock hardware distributor founded in 1954. In the next generation, Oshay’s father split off to build his own leading rope and packaging supplier, Continental Western. Having spent a decade of his youth working in Continental Western’s warehouse, Sam saw how basic logistics and growth were constrained by the ERP technology used by distributors everywhere. 

Recurrency’s goal is to reverse the stagnation in ERP software by building a streamlined, intelligent, and seamless-to-adopt ERP layer that is blazingly fast and supercharged by automation tools like sales intelligence, dynamic pricing, and demand forecasting. Recurrency can meaningfully boost a distributor’s revenue and profit margins, not just provide a better interface.

From a technology perspective, Recurrency engineered a system to integrate directly with legacy ERP systems. Plugging into a customer's system of record and going live in under 15 minutes is nearly unheard of in the ERP world.

Having known Sam as a friend, roommate, recruiting helper, fundraising connector, and more over the years, I can say with confidence that something special is happening at Recurrency.

A total of $22M has been raised from Bessemer Venture Partners, Lachy Groom, Elad Gil, Y Combinator, Contrary, and other supporters including Sequoia Capital, Operator Partners, TQ Ventures, SV Angel, Hack VC, as well as founders/executives from Yahoo, Adobe, Plaid, and Ramp.

In the coming years, Recurrency will be focused on developing the world's most effortless and intelligent ERP tool in existence, and we're honored to help in that journey.

This post is not directed at any investors or potential investors, and does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any securities.

Investing In Recurrency

We’re excited to share that Rohit Deora has joined the team as a software engineer! Rohit joins us from Taplytics where he led many of their frontend initiatives over the course of his 3 year tenure there. Prior to Taplytics, he spent 3 years at Ultimate Software.

As we got to know Rohit, it was clear that his interests strongly aligned with Contrary’s — at the intersection of technology and finance. Rohit holds a CS degree from the University of Waterloo and a Finance degree from Wilfrid Laurier University.

Contrary’s vision of combining sophisticated software, a world-class talent team and scouts to identify and invests in the world’s top talent is further brought to life with Rohit coming onboard.

We're thrilled to welcome Rohit to the team as a Software Engineer.

Welcoming Rohit Deora

Fusion could be the most consequential technology ever produced by humanity. There’s a profound, almost mystical, symbolism in our ability to confine the power source of our solar system into a test tube. In some ways, achieving fusion will feel like a final triumph over nature. After millennia of staring up at the Sun and worshipping its role in giving energy to all life on Earth, we are now learning to mimic and reproduce this power for ourselves.

Our version of fusion, however, will arguably be even more efficient than the processes happening in the Sun, because it will need to happen faster, at higher temperatures and in a smaller area than that available to the Sun. In fact, fusion on Earth will need to happen at temperatures ten times higher than those in the very core of the Sun, a fact that seems like it should be impossible.

However that’s not the only thing that sounds impossible about fusion. Its promises of energy abundance, a near infinite fuel supply, the ability to fuse new elements and increase the power available to each person have the ability to completely reshape human life on Earth. As hard as it is to fathom that we are now capable of developing technologies that produce tiny stars, it’s even harder to imagine what this technology will allow us to achieve in the decades and centuries to come.

For these far-reaching economic, but primarily security implications, fusion research has been kept secret for decades. It has been shielded under the umbrellas of national defense departments, given its close relation to efforts to build weapons of mass destruction, a security measure which has nonetheless delayed humanity’s ability to achieve energy abundance. Despite the years of secrecy, incredibly specialized knowledge required to understand it, and the prohibitive costs involved with studying it, the fusion space is now saturated with numerous private companies determined to find breakthroughs that help propel this technology to mass adoption as soon as possible.

For over a hundred years, we’ve been aware that when two hydrogen isotopes fuse together, an incredible amount of energy is released and a helium atom is produced. For over a hundred years, we’ve known that this reaction has been responsible for powering the Sun and every other star in the universe — and for just as long, scientific debate has raged about whether it would even be possible to replicate this same process on Earth.

On December 5th, 2022 the National Ignition Facility in the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory laid all such doubts to rest. A multi-billion-dollar undertaking of the Department of Energy, home of all things nuclear in the United States, the National Ignition Facility is the largest and most powerful laser on Earth. Actually, it’s not just one laser — it’s 192 lasers lined up next to each other, spanning the length of two football fields. The light from these lasers is accelerated and amplified six times before being converted into ultra violet light and targeted precisely onto a metal cavity that contains a tiny capsule filled with hydrogen isotopes. The lasers are shot at the capsule for a billionth of a second and produce a temperature ten times hotter than in the center of the Sun.

At about 100 million degrees Celsius, hydrogen isotopes are colliding into each other with such immense speed that they begin to fuse. As they do, they release a blast of energy so powerful it pushes other hydrogen isotopes to fuse, and so on, until all the fuel in the capsule is used up. 

This process of heating up the capsule to the point that all its fuel is consumed in a fusion reaction is called ignition. The concept is nearly equivalent to the act of producing enough friction to light a match. Theoretically, it sounds simple enough, but practically, it has taken decades, billions of dollars, and hundreds of attempts to get right. For years, the NIF’s failed attempts led to it being ridiculed as the “Never Ignition Facility” or the “Nearly Ignition Facility”, so you can imagine the relief that ensued when the thirteen-year-old, $3.5 billion laser system finally managed to light fusion’s match. Upon hearing the news, Tammy Ma, who heads the fusion initiative and has worked at the Lawrence Livermore lab for over 14 years, burst into tears while waiting to board a plane.

Ultimately, the NIF laser beamed 2.05 mega joules of ultra-violet light at the fuel capsule, inducing a fusion reaction which released 3.15 mega joules of energy. 

To be clear — 3.15 mega joules is not even one percent of what a nuclear power plant produces every hour. In fact, it’s just about the amount of energy required to boil two pots of water. However, the NIF was not built to be a functioning power plant, it was built as a laboratory experiment to with the explicit purpose of achieving fusion ignition. That effort was a resounding success, and it has placed the coveted milestone of achieving ignition into our rearview mirror once and for all.

The coming challenge for the scientific community devoted to making fusion power a reality now lies in figuring out how to scale this process to an industrial level. Achieving feasible fusion power is a massive design problem which currently presents more questions than answers. Though to better understand all the possible paths forward, let’s review the history of our attempts to unlock star power on Earth.

The secret behind the Sun’s endless power was always a deep, cosmic mystery for a long time. Ironically, it was a quest into the nature of the very small that unlocked insights into the very big.

In 1919, Francis Aston, a precocious British chemist, was determined to measure the weight of an atom. It was just a year after the end of the First World War, which had him enlisted in the army servicing some of Britain’s earliest air force fleet. The war had thwarted his desire to burrow away in a lab and focus exclusively on research. Finally, he had returned to Cambridge to conduct his experiments in peace. The early 20th century was an exciting time in chemistry. There was a firm understanding that all matter was composed of elements — particles of an essential nature, which could not be transformed from their fundamental state. Centuries of discovering solid elements like metals, and distilling various liquids and gases, resulted in humanity collecting a list of such fundamental elements. The list included things like gold, silver, sodium, oxygen and hydrogen. Various forms of chemical analysis helped established the approximate relative weights between the elements, which allowed Dmitry Mendeleev to organize them according to their mass in a table — today’s periodic table.

At the time, the properties of elements and their relationships were understood only approximately, but Aston was not satisfied with approximation. He wanted to measure the precise weights of the atoms themselves.

The way to do it was a clever trick, analogous to determining someone’s height by measuring their shadow. He figured that if he could run ionized atoms through a magnet that deflected the path of their flow, he could determine the weight of ions by the amount the magnet deflected them. The lightest atoms were easiest to deflect, and the heavier atoms were the hardest.

This device created to enable this measurement is known as a mass spectrometer, and it revealed something weird about the weights of the individual atoms. Aston found that the elements were not actually perfect multiples of hydrogen’s weight, they always weighed ever so slightly less than a perfect multiple of hydrogen. For example, helium wasn’t four times the weight of a hydrogen atom, it was actually 3.97 times its weight. This discrepancy carried a clue. 

The results of Aston’s experiments made the rounds, and caught the attention of an astronomer and physicist named Arthur Eddington. Eddington had read Albert Einstein’s 1905 paper years ago, which claimed that there was an equivalence between mass and energy — E=mc^2. The mystery of the missing mass could only mean one thing in Eddington’s mind — the conversion of mass into energy. Eddington was preoccupied with thoughts of stars, planets and galaxies, and suddenly this insight from a chemist opened his eyes to the mechanism that makes the Sun shine.  

Eddington announced his reflections from Aston’s experiment at a conference, saying:

“Aston has further shown conclusively that the mass of the helium atom is less than the sum of the masses of the four hydrogen atoms which enter into it and in this at least the chemists agree with him. There is a loss of mass in the synthesis amounting to 1 part in 120, the atomic weight of hydrogen being 1.008 and that of helium just 4.00. . . . Now mass cannot be annihilated and the deficit can only represent the mass of the electrical energy liberated when helium is made out of hydrogen. If 5% of a star’s mass consists initially of hydrogen atoms, which are gradually being combined to form more complex elements, the total heat liberated will more than suffice for our demands, and we need look no further for the source of a star’s energy.”

The year was 1920. A hunch had clued Eddington in to the fact that the fusion of hydrogen atoms into more complex elements was secretly powering the Sun. It was a guess that predated the existence of quantum mechanics, and even predated our understanding of the atomic structure — but it was basically spot on. The only thing Eddington got wrong was the assumption that only 5% of the Sun’s mass consisted of hydrogen. It was actually 100%. 

The dream of fusion power on Earth was born then and there. "If, indeed, the subatomic energy in the stars is being freely used to maintain their furnaces, it seems to bring a little nearer to fulfillment our dream of controlling this latent power for the well-being of the human race — or for its suicide,” said Eddington.

The discovery of this process was the first time that scientists stopped looking at atomic elements as rigid and unchanging and began looking at them as dynamic particles in the universe, capable of being fused or broken up into smaller parts under the right circumstances. It was also the first time they realized just how much energy was locked inside even the smallest of particles.

Measuring the weights of all the atomic elements revealed an interesting trend. Atoms lighter than iron weighed progressively less than the sum of their constituent particles. It seemed that whenever lighter atoms fused to form a heavier element, energy was released. However, that pattern only held for atoms lighter than iron. 

Atoms heavier than iron needed energy injected to help them fuse. Elements as heavy as uranium, with 92 protons and anywhere from 141 to 146 neutrons, were so heavy they naturally wanted to come apart. These atoms were so unstable, they became radioactive, releasing energy as protons and neutrons naturally broke away from the precarious core.

It was clear that way more energy was released when two small atoms fused than when one heavy atom fissioned. However, the activation energy required to get an already heavy and radioactive element to break apart was way lower than the energy required to force two hydrogen atoms to fuse into helium. Doing that would require conditions as hot and dense as in the center of the Sun.

In the core of the Sun, temperatures reach 10 million degrees Celsius. At this temperature, the atoms get so hot, they form a plasma. Plasma is basically a gas that has become so hot, its electrons start roaming around freely and the entire plasma starts conducting electricity. 

The process of fusion begins with two protons. Protons are positively charged and, under normal circumstances, repel each other. However, inside a hot plasma, particles are flying into each other so fast that they overcome electromagnetic repulsion and instead fuse together. Once this happens, one of the proton becomes a neutron and together, they form an atom called deuterium, which is really just a hydrogen atom, with an extra neutron. The resulting deuterium is then involved in a second fusion reaction. It actually fuses again with more deuterium, or with  tritium — hydrogen but with two extra neutrons — to produce helium.

The energy released during the constant fusing of hydrogen atoms creates enormous outward pressure that is 400 billion times higher than the atmospheric pressure on Earth. However, due to the Sun’s enormous mass, its gravity is strong enough to counteract the outward pressure and keep the hot, fusing plasma compact in a sphere.

Trying to recreate the Sun on Earth was a good first blueprint for designing a fusion plant. In theory, the concept was very clear — heat hydrogen gas to the point that it becomes a plasma, wait until the hydrogen atoms start fusing, and collect the energy produced. The fusion between deuterium and tritium requires less energy to initiate than the fusion of two protons, so this reaction became the focus of fusion efforts on Earth. George Thomson, whose father J. J. Thomson discovered the electron, was the first to propose an idea for a fusion plant along these principles.

The only problem here is that plasma is extremely unstable. In the Sun, the explosive energy released by fusion reactions is contained by the Sun’s massive gravitational force. On Earth, the task of stabilizing an exploding, hot plasma has been compared to “holding jelly with elastic bands.” 

It’s important to keep the plasma stabilized during the course of the fusion reaction so that all of the fuel in the plasma can be used. Otherwise, an unstable fusion reaction would just blow the plasma up and spew perfectly good hydrogen fuel all over the place. More importantly though, the hot plasma would instantly melt any part of the reactor it physically touched.

One approach to solving this problem was by taking advantage of the fact that plasma conducted electricity. The laws of electromagnetism state that every electric field induces a magnetic field, and vice versa. So, a sufficiently powerful magnetic field interacting with the plasma might be able to control its shape and keep it contained. This approach was called magnetic confinement but in practice over the past fifty years, holding plasma together for a long enough time to induce a protracted fusion reaction has been unsuccessful.

Having failed to realize fusion via magnetic confinement for many years, around the 1970s, physicists began looking for other approaches. Rather than heating a plasma, and stabilizing it while all its hydrogen atoms fused, they wondered if you could induce a small fusion reaction so fast that you didn’t have to deal with the problem of holding the plasma together. The amount of fuel used would be smaller, but the reaction would happen so quickly that all the fuel would instantly be used up. The inaugural paper for this approach called inertial confinement was co-authored by John Nuckolls in 1972. Years later, Nuckolls became the director of the Lawrence Livermore laboratory, which started building experimental equipment to test this new approach. Planning for the National Ignition Facility began under Nuckolls’ directorship in the early 1990s, but ground was only broken in 1997, and the facility didn’t become operational until 2009. This excruciatingly slow timeline is a telling detail that lends partial insight into why fusion has taken this long to mature. Finally, fusion ignition was achieved on Earth. It did not happen by magnetic confinement, but by inertial confinement, in the same lab where the approach was initially developed, some fifty years earlier.


Fusion is one of the only means of generating energy where abundance of fuel is not a concern. Unlike wood, coal, natural gas, or even uranium, which are all limited in supply — deuterium and tritium are very easily obtained. Deuterium is just an isotope of hydrogen, and roughly one in every 7000 hydrogen atoms is exactly the deuterium isotope we need. Deuterium can easily be distilled from water, and tritium, the hydrogen isotope with two neutrons, can be produced by reacting neutrons with lithium in a fission reaction.

However, whereas igniting fuels like wood or coal is pretty straightforward, the process of igniting hydrogen isotopes has taken decades. Now that we’ve finally achieved the milestone of ignition, the work begins to build a fusion plant that can generate enough energy to power a city. 

Though we’re far out from that reality, here is the general idea of how a large-scale fusion plant should run:

Deuterium and tritium fuel would be heated from an external energy source until they fused. The fusion reaction would produce a helium nucleus and a neutron. 80% of the energy released during the reaction would be carried by the neutron, and the other 20% would be carried by the helium nucleus. 


Helium nuclei are stripped of their electrons, and thus have a positive charge. When produced by the fusion reaction, they would be trapped by the magnetic field surrounding the reaction, and their energy would be used to heat the plasma further and ignite more fusion reactions. 


Eventually, more and more of these trapped helium nuclei would provide the energy required to continue the fusion reaction until the entire reaction becomes self-sustaining, which is the goal of ignition.


The neutron carrying 80% of the reaction’s energy lacks any electric charge, and would not be confined by the magnetic field. It would fly outward, into a surrounding structure containing lithium, there it would react in a fission reaction with the lithium to produce more tritium fuel and generate a great amount of heat.


The heat given off would boil water, which would produce steam and power a turbine that would generate electricity, just like any major power plant.

Though we have a good sense of how the picture should work as a whole, many details are still unresolved and pose massive engineering challenges for the coming generation of physicists and engineers. These are some of the most immediate problems that would need to be solved provided we stick with the inertial confinement approach:

Finding a repeatable way to heat the fuel capsule. The external source of energy used to heat the fuel capsule is called the driver. The National Ignition Facility used lasers as their driver to heat the fuel. However, the NIF’s lasers can only be fired once a day, since doing it more often would damage them. This is pretty problematic since a fusion plant using the inertial confinement method would need to drive the reaction something like 10 times every second.


Finding an energy efficient way to power the driver. The NIF’s laser requires 300 mega joules of energy to power a 2 megajoule laser blast, which means their driver system converts only 1% of its energy into heating the target. The 2 megajoule blast is capable of igniting a 3 megajoule fusion reaction, but relative to the energy required to power the laser in the first place, the total fusion reaction in the laboratory comes to a massive big energy loss.


Designing a reactor structure that could withstand the effects of neutron bombardment. The neutrons flying out the reaction chamber slam into surrounding walls, putting great strain on the reactor walls and structure overtime. A feasible reactor would need to withstand this kind of bombardment for years, while maintaining its structural integrity. Overtime, the reactor structure would become radioactive, with its internal atoms being destabilized by the neutrons. At the end of the reactor’s lifetime, the structure would need to be sealed to protect from its radioactive effects.

There are dozens of private companies working on solving these problems. Some, like First Light Fusion, are developing an entirely new type of driver system, which would heat the fuel capsule by blasting it with ions at incredibly high speeds. They’re calling this amended version of inertial confinement, ‘projectile fusion.’ 

It’s unclear, though, if inertial confinement can be successfully commercialized. It could be that a completely new direction might prove more practical in the long run. The nine-year-old startup Helion, for instance, has developed a unique reactor design around the principles of both magnetic and inertial confinement. On either ends of their seventh generation “Trenta” reactor, two symmetrical discs of hot plasma are generated before being slammed into each other and compressed by strong magnets to induce a fusion reaction. 

The most interesting part of Helion’s design is that its reactor can generate electricity directly from the reaction. When fusion begins to occur and the plasma starts creating outward pressure, it causes changes in the magnetic field which can be directly recaptured as electricity. This way, no water has to be boiled, and no steam-powered turbines are required to generate electricity. Though these are the traditional methods every major power plant uses, Helion has brilliantly designed a mechanism that reimagines what a large scale fusion reactor could be capable of. It’s due to complete building its 8th generation reactor, “Polaris,” in 2024, which should be capable of converting fusion energy directly into electricity.

Despite these incredible efforts, it’s not obvious when fusion will be ready for commercial use. Extreme optimists say we’re only about a decade away, while skeptics say we could be waiting fifty years or more. Whenever fusion power comes online, there’s no telling what a fusion-enabled society will look like. The promises of abundant energy and nearly infinite stores of fuel could open up the feasibility of everything from inter-planetary travel to developing a functioning artificial general intelligence. The only thing that’s certain is that the cone of possibilities for humanity will widen immensely.

Below are the companies breaking new ground in fusion research:

Helion is designing and building reactors that can generate electricity directly from the fusion reaction.

First Light Fusion is developing a new approach to inertial confinement fusion. Rather than heating the fuel capsule with laser beams, they heat it by blasting it with high velocity ion projectiles.

TAE Technologies is developing reactors that can induce fusion reactions using the magnetic confinement technique. They have been operational since 1998 and have raised nearly $1 billion since then.

General Fusion is a Canadian fusion company developing a reactor that produces fusion via a magnetized target fusion approach.

Tokamak Energy is building out various models of magnetic confinement reactors.

Commonwealth Fusion Systems is designing and building magnetic confinement reactors using powerful types of superconducting magnets.

A deep dive into the core concepts of fusion technology

The Promise of Fusion

We’re excited to share that Andrew Michelson has joined the Contrary team as a Product Operations Manager!

As we got to know Andrew, it was clear that he embodied many of the same characteristics we value deeply in our community — curiosity, drive, and kindness. Prior to joining Contrary, Andrew was the 5th hire at Harmonic, helping to scale the team from 5 to 40 and owning every detail of the Harmonic product.

Andrew was also member of Middlebury’s cross country and track team, joining the ranks of previous college athletes on the Contrary team, and of course adding some competitive spirit.

We're thrilled to welcome Andrew to the team as a Product Operations Manager.

Welcoming Andrew Michelson

What and how we eat is a product of deliberate design. As Tom Standage writes in An Edible History of Humanity, "a cultivated field of maize, or any other crop, is as man-made as a microchip, a magazine, or a missile."

Agriculture is one of the oldest technologies known to man. Over the millennia, its evolution has changed everything from our social structures to the geographic and genetic composition of the earth and its inhabitants.

History has wrangled with foes like resource scarcity, low yields and insufficient energy sources before. The clever inventions that have allowed our food systems to flourish and our population to explode in the previous sixty years from a population of just over 1 billion to a population of 8 billion are codified in the passages below. These incredible successes are worth studying, but they’re not where the story of agriculture ends.  

As the global population continues to inch up to just under 10 billion by 2050, our food systems will face incredible tests, being called upon to produce more food in the next three decades than we have produced in our entire history combined. Meanwhile, the challenges posed by a changing climate, along with higher water and fertilizer prices, and a falling amount of arable land will only add additional pressures to our efforts. 

Ingenious solutions are always inspired by clever ideas from the past — and as we begin to engineer the future of our food systems, we must also understand the technologies that brought us to where we are now.

Although agriculture has come a long way since the earliest days of the Neolithic, the underlying mechanism of food production remains fundamentally non-human. To this day, we rely on plants to do the hard work of converting sunlight and carbon dioxide into edible and energy-rich compounds for us via photosynthesis. Photosynthesis is a process humans are still very far from fully understanding and being able to replicate efficiently.

But just because we can't conduct photosynthesis ourselves doesn't mean we can't help the process along. Agriculture is really just this — a method of choreographing and enhancing unpredictable organic processes to behave more predictably.

That was the initial bet that hunter-gatherers made over 10,000 years ago when they turned to farming. Farming was more energy intensive than hunting animals in the wild, it required more work over longer periods of time, and required that humans stay tied to their land. 

However, the high upfront investment also came with a high reward. Farming yielded 10 to 100 times more calories per acre than hunting and gathering. Over time, coordinated agriculture allowed larger populations to survive over smaller areas of land and carry on the traditions of farming across future generations.

Still, effective agricultural techniques took thousands of years of trial and error to develop. Large amounts of labor were needed to complete all the steps including moving the earth, sowing the land, irrigating crops, reaping and picking, thrashing, grinding and transforming grains and crops into edible foods.

The amount we were able to grow depended on the sources of energy we could call on to ease the difficult work. In this sense, the story of agriculture has always been deeply intertwined with the story of energy. 

Without access to efficient energy sources for thousands of years, agricultural yield was capped for a similar amount of time. In ancient Egypt, the ratio of people to the amount of cultivated land needed to support them was roughly one Egyptian for every two acres. It took 3,500 years to bring that number up to one person per acre by the time that Egypt had become  a province of the Roman Empire, and that's basically where it stayed until the 18th century.

The actual techniques of farming didn't change much in that time span. Engineering waterways for better crop irrigation had been practiced since 6,000 BC, and animals were already an integral part of food production. Their labor was essential to powering heavy plows and assisting in the most energy-intensive tasks.

By the mid 18th-century, history was already littered with examples of how soil erosion had sealed the fates of entire empires and communities, unable to feed their populations. Increasingly, problems with food scarcity and low output were beginning to be an increasingly common issue. 

Europe was already facing other resource shortages. Lumber, used as both a construction material and fuel, was vanishing. European forests were becoming barren and lumber was trading at a record-breaking premium. It was around this time that Thomas Malthus, noting the circumstances, began to worry about the consequences of resource constraints on continued population growth. In 1782, he published his famous Essay on the Principle of Population which argued that great suffering would befall a society whose population grew faster than its ability to produce food and other resources. 

Today, Malthusian thinking is ridiculed because this prediction turned out to be incorrect. Deaths from famine reached historic lows in the 21st century, but that ridicule suffers from hindsight bias. At the time of writing, Malthus could not have foreseen the discovery of a more powerful source of energy that would allow many parts of the food production process to be mechanized, thus tremendously increasing output. In other words, Malthus couldn't foresee coal.

Coal burned a lot longer than wood. Discovery of massive sources of coal reduced the dependency on lumber for fuel and allowed many physically intense parts of the food production process to be taken over by machines. Mechanical seed drills meant sowing no longer had to be done by hand. Mechanical harvesters would cut stalks faster. Threshing machines would separate wheat from chaff while granaries pounded on the separated grain to produce flour. 

By 1900, thanks to the discovery of fossil fuel, crop growing and harvesting was seven times more efficient than it had been 100 years earlier.

Mechanization meant we could plant and reap more, but for the longest time, our understanding of what actually made plants grow was very hazy. 

The 17th century was consumed with debates on whether water was the only input needed to help plants grow, or whether other elements in the air or in the soil played an important, yet invisible, role. 

These early debates put us on the right track. We know today that plants can't grow without three nutrients in particular:

Phosphorous, which is essential to photosynthesis, cell division and the synthesis of DNA

Potassium, which helps plants regulate their water balance and is involved in the synthesis of proteins and carbohydrates

Nitrogen, which is by far the most important of the three. Nitrogen is essential because it is a building block of chlorophyll, the pigment that makes plants green and allows them to convert sunlight into energy through photosynthesis. 

Healthy, fertile soil replenishes these three elements through natural processes, making them available for plants. However, for thousands of years, humans have known that natural soil fertility could be augmented with the use of fertilizers, such as by layering manure on top or rotating your primary crops with leguminous species like alfalfa or soybeans.

Legumes somehow always replenished the soil they were planted in, but the underlying mechanism was not understood for thousands of years. The Greek philosopher Theophrastus, who lived around the 3rd century BC, said "the bean best reinvigorates the ground," and even Cato the Elder, living in the 2nd century BC, advised farmers to plant leguminous varieties "not so much for the immediate return as with a view to the year later."

The secret that made these techniques effective, which eluded early generations that practiced them, was their ability to infuse the earth with nitrogen. All biological processes rely on this element, normally found as a gas, floating everywhere around us at all times. It's a building block of proteins and DNA, but we can't get it from breathing it in. Humans get nitrogen from eating animals or plants, which in turn absorb it from the soil.

There are only a handful of natural processes that can convert gaseous atmospheric nitrogen into the kind of compound that plants can soak up through their roots. As far as we know, only a few species of bacteria are able to do this. These bacteria have enzymes which can convert atmospheric nitrogen (N2) into ammonia (NH3), but they are sensitive to oxygen, and so the entire process must take place anaerobically. 

Leguminous crops, like various sorts of beans, have tiny nodules in their roots that provide shelter and an oxygen-free environment where bacteria can conduct these operations in peace. Soybeans, alfalfa plants and other legumes evolved symbiotically with nitrogen-fixing bacterias, and now possess the superpower of regenerating soil fertility merely by being planted!

It was not until the end of the 19th century, however, that the inner workings of the nitrogen cycle and its importance to organic life were discovered. Our awakening to the importance of nitrogen spurred a mad dash for any compounds that contained it. Alas, the only source of mineable, soluble nitrogen was found in the deserts of Chile, which quickly became the world's greatest exporter of nitrates and a crucial geopolitical player as a result.

The holy grail of agriculture, of course, would be a technology that could synthesize soluble nitrogen out of the air, circumventing the need to rely on bacteria or Chilean exports. It was a challenging feat of chemistry, and few scientists believed it was even possible. 

It was ultimately a man named Fritz Haber who figured it out in the early 20th century. He grew up in a merchant household, with his father trading dyes, lacquers, and other chemical compounds. Having been surrounded by chemicals his whole life, Haber went on to study chemistry, and ultimately apply his learning to solving the greatest chemical conundrum of his day — synthesizing soluble nitrogen in the form of ammonia. 

Around the turn of the 20th century, solving this puzzle was becoming particularly valuable since ammonia and other nitrogenous compounds were an important ingredient in explosives. With the impending outbreak of World War I, it was in the interest of every nation to get its hands on as much ammonia as possible without risk of being cut off from supply.

Around this time, Haber was working as something of an 'entrepreneur-in-residence' at BASF (the “Baden Aniline and Soda Factory”), a giant of German industry which remains the largest chemical producer in the world to this day. BASF would pay him a salary, and in exchange, Haber would devote all his time to researching the synthesis of ammonia. If anything of note was discovered by his research, BASF would retain the intellectual property. 

Iterating on years of trial and error by the scientists that preceded him, Haber and his assistant discovered, as if by a stroke of luck, the precise conditions required to make ammonia out of nitrogen and hydrogen gases. Mixing these two gases together, while simultaneously subjecting them to a pressure of 200 atmospheres and a temperature of 600 degrees Celsius, was what did the trick. 

BASF representatives trembled with excitement upon seeing Haber's invention drip liquid ammonia before their eyes. The only problem was that Haber's contraption was 75 cm tall, and could only produce a few milligrams of ammonia every few hours. BASF wasn't interested in milligrams of the stuff, but tons, so it appointed an internal employee, Carl Bosch, to figure out how to recreate the procedure at an industrial scale.

Bosch wasn't as much a chemist as a metallurgist, an important background given that the main challenge before him was figuring out how to create an industrial-scale system that could withstand 200 atmospheres and 600 degrees Celsius without breaking or melting. Within four years he figured it out, and by 1913 he presided over the construction of the first plant to synthesize ammonia in the world. 

Haber was awarded the Nobel prize for his efforts in 1918, and Bosch won the Nobel in 1931. Bosch was the first scientist working in the private sector to ever win the award. 

It's hard to overstate just how important this invention really was. Until then, nitrogen was the limiting factor in all agricultural output. After the invention of the Haber-Bosch process, that limit was rendered obsolete. Synthesizing ammonia meant that plant fertilizer could now be produced through industrial means for the first time. Over the course of the 20th century, the global population shot up from 1.6 billion people to 6 billion, and soon the Haber-Bosch process was responsible for producing more ammonia than the entire terrestrial nitrogen cycle itself. 

The same year that BASF's ammonia plant got up and running, American tycoon John D. Rockefeller was incorporating the Rockefeller Foundation. Rockefeller had so much money that he needed to set up an entire philanthropic operation to donate it efficiently. Rather than donating to individuals in need directly, the Foundation decided to focus on tackling problems at their root. 

One of the greatest such root problems confronting the world was famine and poor harvests in certain parts of the world. The Rockefeller Foundation decided to tackle these issues by hiring Norman Borlaug, an American agronomist, to study different species of wheat to discover whether a genetic super plant could be bred by crossing different varietals. 

Borlaug set up shop in Mexico, which was suffering acutely from low crop yields despite being home to a wealth of genetic diversity. It took him nearly twenty years of research to examine thousands of wheat variants; finally, in 1962, he introduced a variety of wheat so impressive that in the following year, Mexico was yielding six times what it normally grew. That same year, Mexico went from being a net importer of grain to being a net exporter.

On the back of Borlaug's success, the International Rice Research Institute was founded in the 60s to breed the best yielding, fastest growing rice crop the world had ever seen. This time, the Institute was funded by two American philanthropic endowments, the Rockefeller and the Ford Foundations. The Institute examined over 10,000 varieties of rice to find the strongest and most nutritious strains to cross. By 1966, the mission succeeded. A strain of rice called IR-8 was developed, which was a cross between a Philippine and a Taiwanese varietal that could produce three harvests per year and yield roughly five times as much as other varieties of rice. Some started giving it the nickname "miracle rice."

The combination of genetic experimentation amplified by the copious availability of synthetic fertilizer launched an unprecedented global agricultural boom called "The Green Revolution."

The technologies introduced by the Green Revolution re-organized industrial agriculture. For one, they completely decoupled the process of growing crops from animal husbandry. In the past, animals were one of the only available sources of fertilizer. The ability to synthesize ammonia changed that. Farms didn't have to do both anymore, so growing crops and growing livestock became their own isolated specialties with their own economies of scale. Faster growing crops meant cheaper feed for animals, which meant cheaper meat production. Central feeding operations soon constituted the bulk of all poultry and cattle production in America.

The Green Revolution also produced a number of unsavory environmental externalities. Heavy use of fertilizer contributed to large amounts of chemical run-offs which harmed neighboring ecosystems. Increased use of water required to irrigate all the new crops being grown led to lower water tables and depleted aquifers around the world. Finally, intense farming practices left little time for land to lay fallow and naturally regenerate essential elements, depleting natural soil fertility and making farming even more dependent on the use of synthetic fertilizer.

The problem of agriculture is the same as it has always been. What's the most resource-efficient way to grow enough food to feed everyone on Earth? The only difference is that to feed a world population soon approaching 10 billion, we will need to produce more food in the next thirty years than we have produced during our entire history, while factoring in more constraints than we have had to deal with in the past.

For one, the amount of arable land is falling over time, as more soil is eroded by intense farming. Jeremy Grantham suggests that half of all arable farmland, if not more, has eroded since the beginning of agriculture. For another, many are growing concerned about the use of fossil fuels like natural gas in the production of ammonia. Ammonia consists of three parts hydrogen, to one part nitrogen. The nitrogen we extract from the air, but the hydrogen is removed from methane or natural gas, which has become the most important input in producing fertilizer.

The vulnerability of having such a close link between fuel and food was made evident in the aftermath of Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine. With Russian natural gas embargoed, fertilizer prices around the world shot up, causing increases in the cost of food. A full year after Russia began its war, food prices are still elevated and slow to fall. Finally, further changes in the Earth's climate will undoubtedly impact the cost of inputs to grow food and the yields of planted crops.

One solution to the problems caused by a changing climate is the growth of the indoor farming movement. Controlled environment agriculture, as it's also called, is meant to provide consistent harvests with year-round availability.

The essential advantage of indoor farms, which really look like industrial greenhouses, is their ability to shelter and precisely control the growing environment of crops all while minimizing the amount of space required to grow crops.

Growing produce in nutrient rich solutions has obviated the need for soil, and has meant that plants can now be stacked vertically, further maximizing use of space in farming. 

Indoor farming also places high emphasis on artificial light to help plants grow year round, even in less sunnier seasons, and the practice became more commercially viable when LED technology improved to the point that growers could place lights close enough to the plants without damaging them. This, in turn, helped indoor farmers fit even more growing produce into the same area. 

One of the leaders and pioneers of indoor farming technology is the Netherlands, which thanks to this technology has become the second largest exporter of agriculture by dollar value, second only to the US, despite it having a landmass that is 270 times smaller.

This scale of production is made possible through the "precision farming" techniques employed in these greenhouses. Drones and special sensors test for everything from soil chemistry, water content, nutrients and rate of plant growth. Precise monitoring software has also enabled farmers to be more economical with inputs. From 2000, Dutch farmers have reduced dependence on water by 90% for certain crops, and have nearly entirely eliminated the use of chemical pesticides.

Part of the Dutch success story, however, lies in the fact that it once had access to incredibly cheap domestic natural gas. Cheap energy was essential for lighting and heating some of these massive indoor farming operations — and these greenhouses really are massive. Nearly 80% of Dutch cultivated land is technically "indoors", or under a greenhouse.

Still, the yields from these operations are impressive. An indoor acre can yield as much as 10 outdoor acres for certain crops, and cut the need for chemicals by 97%.

It's no wonder they've also become quite popular in the United States, which imports most of its vegetables in the summer months, and is becoming increasingly interested in growing more produce locally. The approach has succeeded here for certain varieties. For instance, 60% of all fresh tomatoes consumed in the US are grown in controlled environments. Recently, a number of companies from Plenty to AppHarvest have been investing in spreading the footprint of Dutch-inspired technology in the US. AppHarvest, in particular, built the largest greenhouse in the United States in Kentucky in 2021, is taking advantage of Dutch-made software, and is employing clever methods, like collecting and filtering rainwater to irrigate their crops and reduce costs as much as possible.

The expansion of closed environment, or closed-loop, systems are succeeding beyond just produce. The ability to precisely control all growing conditions and reduce environmental externalities has captured the imaginations of producers around the world. 

Aquaculture is another example where the trend has taken off. The majority of aquaculture, or fish farming, looks like open-ocean nets in which thousands of fish are bred. These operations have gotten so successful at producing fish that aquaculture now exceeds global beef production by weight, and even exceeds the market for wild-caught fish. 

There are some emerging concerns, however, about open-ocean farms. The propensity for the fish to more easily spread diseases, sea lice and other nasty things is one of them. The pollution released into the ocean by the chemicals and the fish is another. 

Closed-loop fish farms, typically meaning indoor tanks, can avoid imposing an externality on the ocean and more closely monitor the conditions for the fish.

Still, it's expensive to reproduce an environment and artificially supply it with all its energy and nutrient needs — especially when this involves recreating oceanic conditions indoors. In closed-loop fishing, constant energy is required to keep the water clean and cooled to the right temperature. Also not all crops can be grown indoors. Tall, vertical grain crops, which the world still depends on as its primary source of calories, just isn't economically feasible to produce inside. Continuing to produce sufficient quantities of crops while responding to the growing challenges of soil erosion, water depletion, and the economical production of fertilizer will be some of the most important challenges of the coming decades. 

The future of growing foods, whether its wheat in the field, lettuce in a greenhouse, mackerel in a tank, or meat in a lab, will need to evolve constantly in response to the changes nature throws our way. The world's oldest technology, agriculture, thus will never be finished or perfected. Its future is destined to involve as much problem solving going forward as it took to get us here today. 

Below are the companies working on the biggest challenges in food production:

1. Inari is building a gene modification platform that can fine-tune plant genetics in important crops like corn, soybeans and wheat.

2. AgBiome is creating a database of microbes that can produce more nutrients for crops, and help them fight off harmful fungi and pests.

3. Gingko Bioworks is using genetic engineering techniques to produce strains of bacteria which can help crops fertilize themselves.   

4. Orchard Robotics is using computer vision to give farmers more accurate, total data on the trees in their orchards. 

5. Bowery Farming uses vertical farming and sophisticated computer-based techniques to grow and sell lettuce, leafy greens, and herbs at over 850 stores throughout the US.

6. Plenty is another controlled environment agriculture company that uses vertical farming and computer-based techniques to grow and sell produce.

7. Whole Oceans is building one of the largest land-based aquaculture facilities to grow Atlantic salmon in Bucksport, Maine.

A deep dive into the core technologies allowing for food abundance

The Technology of Food Production

Turns out — computers aren’t getting faster anymore. So much for progress in the world of bits. For decades, the world has been transformed by the reality of Moore’s law, the expectation that the chips powering our computers would double in computational power every two years, while falling in energy usage and price.

This phenomenon is responsible for creating the most valuable companies on Earth while completely redefining humanity's relationship with technology, which is why it’s particularly startling that all that is now in the past.

“Moore’s Law is dead,” pronounced Nvidia’s CEO, Jensen Huang in September, before adding “the idea that the chip is going to go down in price is a story of the past.”

Today’s chips come packed with billions of transistors, capable of executing billions of instructions per second. The smallest transistors on the market are now hitting the 3 nanometer mark, a length equivalent to 15 Silicon atoms. Though as going ever smaller presents tremendous financial, let alone physical challenges, many are bracing themselves for a world where achieving our digital dreams is only going to get more expensive from here.

Currently, every major company that relies on computing is exploring ways to approach this new normal. Some are rethinking the designs of chips in their devices while others are beefing up the number of silicon experts they have in-house. The following piece traces the evolution of chip economics and design to better understand how we got here, and explore what the future might look like as a new chapter opens up in the world of hardware.

Electricity plays a crucial role in computers. It represents the physical form of information. So, to manipulate information, we first needed to figure out how to manipulate the flow of electricity.

In the early twentieth century, one of the biggest puzzles in electrical engineering was finding a mechanism that could switch electrical signals on and off — using electrical signals themselves. In 1911, Palo Alto native Lee DeForest figured out one of the first ways of doing it when he discovered the vacuum tube.

A vacuum tube is a glass vial with two components. A cathode at one end, which heats up and produces a stream of electrons, and an anode at the other end. By regulating whether or not a voltage is applied to the anode, you can control whether electrons will be permitted to pass across the vacuum from the cathode end to the anode end, powering a circuit.

These circuits, made by soldering together vacuum tubes, copper wires, and other rudimentary electrical components, could be assembled to perform basic logic functions. If you put enough logic functions together, you could make a primitive calculator — one that could do basic addition, subtraction, division, and multiplication. The University of Pennsylvania's ENIAC, built in 1946, was one of the first attempts at a large-scale electrical computer that could perform these calculations. But, it was composed of 18,000 vacuum tubes, miles of copper wire, and required 150,000 watts of power to operate. There was a rumor going around that whenever the ENIAC was switched on, the lights in Philadelphia dimmed.

The vacuum tubes would glow with heat, which required fans to cool them down. The glowing also attracted moths, which would short-circuit the machine, requiring engineers to literally de-bug it.

An improvement on glowing-hot vacuum tubes soon arrived from Bell Labs, where researchers were experimenting with a new class of materials they called semiconductors. Somewhere in-between a conductor, like a metal, and an insulator, like glass, semiconductor materials selectively allowed electrical current to flow through them. The trick was to figure out how to make the semiconductors allow current to flow through them when prompted.

The breakthrough came in 1947 from John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, a duo working under the guidance of William Shockley at Bell Labs. Together, Bardeen and Brattain built the first working prototype of a solid state electrical switch, the transistor. Transistors allowed electricity to flow selectively through solid material, rather than having to detour through fragile and hot glass bulbs. That meant smaller circuits which could be turned on and off faster and use less energy to do it.

Two years later in an interview, Shockley said, "There has been a great deal of thought spent on electronic brains, or computing machines. It seems to me that in these robotic brains, the transistor is the ideal nerve cell."

Shockley realized the transistor would soon take over the world of electronics, replacing everything that was touched by vacuum tubes. He started his own company, 'Shockley Semiconductors' to start mass manufacturing the devices, and sought out America's finest minds to help him. That quest led him to Robert Noyce, a physicist from MIT, and Gordon Moore, a chemist from Caltech. Shockley certainly had the right idea, but he was a deeply unpleasant personality. Within a year of signing up to work with him, all the engineers Shockley hired walked out to start their own company instead.

That operation, named Fairchild Semiconductors, after their main backer, was arguably Silicon Valley's first 'start up.' The opportunity of mass-producing transistors was unparalleled, but the experience of making them was hell. The transistors were tiny, and still needed to be hand-soldered to other electrical components, which was a grueling, inaccurate and frustrating feat of human labor.

Rather than spend hours hunched over a soldering iron, Robert Noyce figured it might be a better idea to etch the complete circuit, transistors, wires and all, onto one solid wafer of semiconductor material. The integrated circuit was born. "I was lazy," said Noyce, reflecting on his bout of genius, "it just didn't make sense having people soldering together these individual components."

The etching was done by a process called photolithography, which shone light rays at silicon treated with light-sensitive material that hardened when exposed to light. This process allowed manufacturers to produce the circuit's grooves. Year after year, photolithographic techniques got better and better, which allowed Fairchild to make their circuits more and more complex.

The first integrated circuit made by Fairchild Semiconductors had only a single transistor, capable of completing just one logic function. By 1968, the transistors on Fairchild's integrated circuits numbered over a thousand.

As integrated circuits got smaller, they started to be called chips, but despite the cutesy name, something remarkable was happening on the surface of these chips. The smaller the transistors got, the smaller the current needed to activate them, and the smaller the transistors, the more transistors you could fit on the same chip. In perhaps the greatest example of economies of scale in history, the tinier transistors got, the more computation you could do for less power. The economics of miniaturization were so good they were almost unbelievable. By scaling down the size of a transistor by two, you scaled up the computational power by a factor of eight!

Naturally, this begged the question how far this miniaturization could go. Already by 1965, Gordon Moore had predicted, or maybe prophesied, that the number of components on a chip would double every two years. But Moore's colleague at Caltech, the engineer and physicist Carver Mead wanted an answer to how small these transistors could get. After all, transistors were just little gates that allowed electrons to flow through when activated and blocked electrons when de-activated. The gates, in theory, could get really small indeed. Though the technology didn't exist to make transistors this small yet, Mead theorized that you could theoretically get them small enough to fit something like 10^7 to 10^8 onto an area of 1cm^2.

For 1971, these claims were outrageous. At the time, integrated circuits only had about 1000 transistors on them, but Mead was predicting an improvement of 5 to 6 magnitudes. While many academics and computer specialists were busy doubting Mead's predictions, Gordon Moore was already working tirelessly to make them a reality.

By 1968, Fairchild Semiconductors was a big, clunky company with 30,000 employees. It wasn't a startup anymore — it was, as Robert Noyce put it, a supertanker. In order to compete with the fast-moving world of electronics, Noyce and Moore left Fairchild to start a new, nimbler venture. They called their new company Integrated Electronics, which they shortened to Intel.

Right around the seventies, these integrated circuits were starting to count pretty well, but they couldn't remember much. Noyce and Moore figured that if transistors could increase the speed and energy efficiency of processing logic functions, maybe they could do the same for memory storage.

Intel's first product was the 1103 — a semiconductor-based memory chip. Transistors would open and close to either store or release an electric charge, thereby storing or releasing information.

The insight for Intel's next great invention came from Ted Hoff, an engineer who wondered what might happen if you could integrate both a 1103 memory chip and a processing unit all into the same integrated circuit. The result was the 4004 chip, released in the third year of Intel's existence. The 4004 wasn't just a chip, it was an entire computer on a chip! It cost $360, had 2,300 transistors, could perform 60,000 instructions per second, but most importantly, it could execute instructions stored in a memory bank and had working "scratch pad" memory to help it complete more complicated calculations.

This made it the first generally programmable 'central processing unit' or CPU, and it was a game changer. Ted Hoff later said, "With this product, we changed people's perception of computers and the direction that the computing industry would go. We democratized the computer."

The year after Intel released the 4004, they released the 8008, then in two years the 8080, which was ten times faster than the 4004, but still cost the same $360.

The fact that a generally programmable computer could be not only affordable, but also the size of a thumbnail, gave rise to the idea that computers weren’t just for offices anymore. Soon, each person could have a computer of their own.

The Altair 8800, released in 1975, was the first attempt at a 'personal computer.' It was powered by the Intel 8080 chip, had only 250 bytes of memory, and could be programmed by flipping a bunch of mechanical switches. Remarkably, 25,000 Altairs 8800s were sold for $1,000, just enough for the producers to break even. The Altair may not have had much staying power, but in the wake of its rollout, things moved fast.

Later that year, Bill Gates and Paul Allen launched Microsoft, whose first product was an interpreter that helped users program their Altair 8800s. Two years later, in 1977, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs released the Apple II, a personal computer decked out with a monitor and the first commercially available graphical user interface, and powered by the MOS 6502 CPU, a chip rivaling Intel's.

Intel's invention of a CPU that programmers could write their own code for gave birth to the personal computing movement. However, it was only when IBM, the largest computer company in the world, started ordering CPUs from Intel to produce its line of PCs that Intel's dominance over the computing industry was set.

IBM flooded Intel with orders. To meet the demand, Intel had to start licensing its chip designs, called instruction set architectures, to other semiconductor foundries.

The instruction set architecture provides a complete description of a chip. It defines which instructions the processor can perform, what data types it can read, how memory is managed, along with a host of other things.

All of Intel's chips were being built to the specifications of their x86 architecture, and given the massive demand for Intel chips, soon nearly all semiconductor foundries were manufacturing chips according to Intel's x86 model too.

Manufacturing chips according to one set of specifications made it easier on semiconductor foundries and on software writers, who could be sure that their programs would be compatible with any chip as long as it was designed to x86 standards. But the extreme standardization was bad news for any other companies hoping that their chip designs would see the light of day.

The world of personal computing simply wasn't big enough for multiple versions of CPU architectures, and the fact that Intel's x86 model won out meant that many competing integrated device manufacturers fell by their wayside.

Given the landscape, most companies working on chips had to pick if they wanted to focus on designing and selling their own chip designs, and risk never getting any customers, or focus on fabricating someone else's designs, an increasingly competitive field where costs of production were starting to rise.

By 2000, regularly available CPUs had nearly 10 million transistors. The transistor gate lengths were becoming smaller than the wavelengths of light and therefore invisible to the human eye. Manufacturing integrated circuits at such a tiny scale was becoming a more expensive operation, to the point that soon, foundries were starting to out-innovate Intel. In 1999, TSMC, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, was the first semiconductor foundry to make transistors that were 180 nanometers wide.

Year after year, the cost of producing smaller transistors pushed more and more foundries out of business. Getting your hands on the increasingly esoteric photolithography instruments required deep pockets, and not everyone could cough up the cash. In the following years, the semiconductor industry saw wave after wave of corporate consolidation and mergers.

A deep dive into the evolution and future of chip design.

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