Power (2)
Joke spoke.
"Yeah. Put simply, they want protectionism. They figure East Asia's been living the good life for too long."
"We've been living the good life?"
"East Asia's full of export-driven economies."
"True."
"And exports mostly move by ship."
"Well… yeah?"
Joke's voice dropped low.
"Pretty much every ocean on Earth is under American management. That's what makes safe trade possible. But the result was East Asia getting too prosperous — and a lot of Americans got jealous. So now they're saying they won't protect the seas anymore."
America would stop protecting the seas? Protect them from whom?
And what would change if they stopped?
"What happens if America stops protecting the seas?"
"Everything changes. If the oceans are crawling with pirates, how do you trade? Or someone pretending to be a pirate?"
"Whoa."
Pirates? In this day and age?
Or someone pretending to be pirates?
It felt a little absurd.
Joke gave a bitter laugh.
"I can't stand isolationists either. Free trade enables specialization, and specialization drives real growth — that's just common sense. Look at semiconductors. America designs, East Asia manufactures. That's why the industry got this far. I'm all for a connected world."
"Hmm… I see."
"These isolationist types just want to look out for themselves. And if they can choke off trade and watch someone collapse, they're ready to swoop in and clean up the wreckage."
"Wow… that's cold. But doesn't America lose out if trade stops too?"
"Sure. But America's the only country that can be self-sufficient in energy and food. Can Korea feed itself and pump its own oil?"
Not a chance.
"No."
"See? If trade grinds to a halt, America will struggle. But everyone else will be sitting in the dark and starving."
It was chillingly realistic.
Was this what the Vice President of the United States actually wanted?
"Of course not every American thinks that way. Plenty of people believe we can all prosper together — like me."
"Well, that's a relief."
Joke chuckled.
"While you're at it, you should start making connections."
"Connections?"
"Yeah. Into American politics. At your level now, you can pull that off."
"I'll… think about it."
"Fine. So since I answered your questions so nicely, how about a few more LPUs? Huh? My engineers lost their minds when they saw the LPU specs! If I don't bring more back, I'm getting kicked out."
We currently held twenty-one thousand LPUs.
TSMC would keep producing them, and now that Illys had absorbed the duchy, repairing defective units would push overall yields higher still.
"Alright. I'll set more aside for you. Oh, right — Joke."
"Yeah?"
"I get that the US Vice President is an isolationist, and I get that isolationism means shutting down global trade. But why is he asking me to build a factory? I don't even have a factory in Korea."
"That's just how they are."
"Excuse me?"
"Those people are reckless by nature. Before they wall themselves off, they want to drag every kind of factory onto American soil. Build the plants first, then choke off trade and watch everyone else go under. They throw that demand at anyone who walks by. Just ignore them for now."
"Ah……"
I hung up and turned to Manager Jang.
He'd been translating, so he'd heard every word.
"Manager. The Vice President… these isolationists — are they in their right minds?"
Manager Jang offered a wry smile.
"I used to be a lawyer, you know."
"Right."
"I've seen every ugly thing imaginable. Murder, robbery, fraud, assault… the world's a circus."
"Still… can America really get away with this?"
"Hmm. Law only works within an agreed-upon boundary — inside a nation's borders. Between nations, there effectively is no law."
"There's international law, though."
"There is, but it doesn't mean much. Take Russia and Ukraine. Is it illegal to attack another country?"
"Well, of course……"
"If you fire a missile into another country, do you get arrested?"
I'd never thought about it that way.
Wasn't it illegal under the laws of the country that got hit?
But could a nation that lost a war punish the one that won?
"America has fought plenty of wars. Vietnam, North Korea, Iraq — the list goes on. None of those countries had the power to punish the United States. Between nations, power is the law."
"So what do we do when the US Vice President makes outrageous demands?"
"That's why Joke gave you a hint."
"Get involved in American politics?"
The Vice President's baseless demands — and the supposed solution — both felt pretty ridiculous.
But looking at it honestly, there didn't seem to be another option.
What could a small Korean company possibly do against the Vice President of the United States?
Still, that was a problem for later.
The staff were waiting.
"Let's just finish the meeting first."
"Agreed."
It was a complicated world.
Suwon, Gyeonggi Province.
The cleanroom at the Osung Semiconductor Research Institute.
Under the bright lights, people sealed head-to-toe in white cleanroom suits barely dared to breathe.
Whiiiiir.
A soft mechanical hum filled the air.
Beyond the glass, equipment moved with deliberate slowness.
At the front, one researcher stared at the electron microscope display and swallowed hard.
Right in the middle of a chip surface that should have reflected evenly, a dark spot sat like a stain.
"Another… failure."
A sigh leaked out from inside the cleanroom suit.
On the screen, the cross-section of an ultrafine copper pillar connecting stacked HBM dies was magnified to the limit.
These pillars linked the DRAM below to the DRAM above when the chips were stacked.
But the position of this pillar was off by 0.000001 mm.
There were five hundred pillars with that same error.
Each layer needed five thousand pillars. Roughly five hundred of them per layer were misaligned.
"Ahem……!"
Someone cleared their throat on purpose, but the air only grew heavier.
Among the white-suited figures was the president of Osung Electronics himself.
His eyes cut sharp as he asked,
"Is stacking RAM that hard?"
"……"
No one answered the rebuke easily.
The president scowled.
"Conference room. All of you."
The researchers filed out like prisoners being marched away.
Once they reached the conference room, the president pulled off his cleanroom hood and asked,
"So what's the yield?"
The chief researcher spoke quietly.
"The yield is… around 0.2 percent."
"…Two percent?"
"Not two percent. Zero point two percent."
Whoosh.
There was no wind in a sealed indoor conference room, but something cold seemed to pass through the air.
"You're talking success rate, not defect rate — right?"
"Yes."
"Not twenty percent. Not two percent. Zero point two?"
"…Yes."
At that rate, even the successes were basically lucky accidents.
Still, the researchers had their own case to make.
"Sir. Stacking RAM layer upon layer is… extremely difficult."
"Difficult, so what?"
The president swept his gaze across the room.
"Nvidia stacked five layers. And that's not all — JH unveiled twenty. They showed the real thing right there at CES in America. And us? Our competitors can do it, so we just say it's too hard and give up? Is that how this ends?"
No one answered.
When the charge was everyone else can do it, so why can't you, there was nothing to say.
Whatever anyone claimed, they were the best semiconductor researchers in the country.
What kind of school was Korea University?
At Korea University, saying you'd been first in your high school class got you treated like an idiot.
Why? Because everyone had been first in their class.
The only students who hadn't been first in their schools were the ones from science high schools or gifted academies.
Even a master's graduate from that place ended up as the water boy here.
Why?
Look left and you saw a senior who'd finished a doctorate. Look right and you saw your own advisor.
Left and right were the easy directions.
Look forward and you found former American professors. Look back and you found Nobel Prize winners.
This was a world-class research institute.
If anyone asked where the future of semiconductors lived, they could lift their heads and point to Suwon with pride.
If only Nvidia in America had succeeded, they could have told themselves, well, that's America.
But a domestic company had pulled it off while they couldn't — and no one outside these walls was going to cut them any slack for that.
"So the bottom line is you can't set the pillars when you stack the RAM."
"Correct. We need five thousand pillars between each layer, and that is not trivial."
"So what's the solution?"
Silence settled heavy over the room.
But when the president asked a direct question, someone had to answer. The chief researcher spoke up.
"There are two main approaches. The first is to build the pillars from above and below, then bond them. That method at least pushes the yield up to five percent."
"Really? Then why did you say 0.2 percent?"
"Building the pillars as solid copper rods performs better. That's what Nvidia does. But to do that, you have to set the pillars and then bond them — and if even a single micro-spark jumps during the process, the entire unit is scrap."
"What about JH?"
"Theirs aren't ordinary copper pillars."
"Then what are they?"
"They coat the copper with some material that has extraordinary electrical conductivity."
"So what is it?"
"They call it… Mithril. It's a substance we don't understand either."
The president's face twisted.
"So with our current tech, yield is five percent. If we try to copy Nvidia, it's 0.2 percent. And whatever JH is doing, we can't even begin to imitate it?"
The conference room went quiet again.
Then the strategy director seated beside the president quietly raised a hand.
Sharp-featured, intellectual. He adjusted his glasses lightly and spoke.
"Sir. Historically, we've lagged the United States by two to three years."
"Hmm. That's true."
The idea that America was ahead of them wasn't something that still got him worked up.
The president knew how to accept facts.
"The problem is JH. JH has demonstrated technology far beyond even the Americans."
"And the response?"
"Change the way we look at the problem and the response changes too. If we treat this as our technology falling behind, the researchers have to stay up all night and catch up."
"But?"
"Look at it differently. One day, a small domestic company with extraordinary technology simply appeared."
"A small company?"
"Yes. A small company that dropped out of nowhere with technology from the future. And if you look at their headcount, they're not even a small company — they're basically one S-tier professor and the people under him."
In this industry, an S-tier professor was no longer an individual.
A professor of that caliber typically ran postdocs, a dozen doctoral candidates, master's students, support staff — enough people to fill an entire building.
Comparing JH to a single S-tier professor wasn't wildly off in terms of scale.
"Oh. You can look at it that way."
"I acknowledge JH's technical capability. Geniuses do appear in this world. And if one does, we simply bring that genius into Osung."
Bang!
The president slammed his palm on the desk.
"That's it! Keep going."
The strategy director continued.
"Of course, JH is unlikely to join Osung willingly. Korean company founders would rather cling to control of their own company than sell out for money."
"True enough."
"But even if they refuse, that's fine. We collaborate instead."
"Collaborate?"
"Yes. Anyone who runs a semiconductor business in Korea has no choice but to deal with Osung Electronics. So we make technology disclosure a condition of collaboration. We tell them we need to understand their standards so we can manufacture to their specifications."
"So — foundry work? We build it, they hand over the tech?"
"Exactly. They already had TSMC produce the LPU. That means they already disclosed the technology to TSMC. You can't manufacture an LPU without sharing the design. Same principle here. If we offer to produce the Blue Tower cheaply, they have no real reason to refuse us."
Having laid it out, the strategy director fell quiet and smiled.
The president saw that smile and returned it.
The smiles of men who had been around the block too many times.
The president turned to the researchers.
"Strategy director stays. Everyone else out."
"Yes, sir."
Only the president and the strategy director remained.
"So we propose a collaboration, and if the chance comes, we snatch the technology."
"You always catch on so fast, sir."
"And if they sue? They already unveiled the tech at CES. The evidence that it's theirs is overwhelming. Plus they have connections in America — we'd lose eventually."
"We're Osung. We have the power to drag any domestic court case out for ten years. By then, that technology will have been obsolete for a long time. We toss them a few coins at the end and call it done."
"Hahaha. You've got a wide field of vision, Strategy Director."
"Thank you. Business isn't just about technology, is it?"
"Of course not. Business, in the end, is power."
"Exactly. Business is power. At least in Korea, our power is the strongest. In business, the rule is that you don't limit your means. We're simply following the rules. Under those rules, a professional boxer and a kindergartner step into the ring together. Fairly."
"Good. Let's go a fair round with them. Contact JH immediately."
"Understood."
The president and the strategy director smiled.