Mar. 11 at 3:05 PM
$PLAB the process of bringing a single chip to production may require 20 different wafer tape-outs during the R&D process as the design is iterated. AI wafers will be on the higher end while more mature tech could be a single easy tape out.
Lets just go with an example of 5 AI wafer tape outs. Each tape out may require 100 different photomasks for the layered design. Here we have META designing four different AI chips in parallel, possible requiring over 2,000 (4x5x100) photomasks to get to the final mask set for mass production - at ~
$100K/mask this is a
$200M R&D outlay simply for the photomasks to get these four chips to production (let alone whatever other designs they tried and passed on).
PLAB's AI related photomask revenue hit an ATH of
$71M last quarter, growing 19%. They have already alluded to running of out capacity - the shift towards custom designs and the associated R&D can - and may have already begun to - hockey-stick PLAB revenue
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-11/meta-preparing-to-deploy-four-new-homegrown-chips-to-handle-ai?srnd=homepage-americas
