Japan plans to build a semiconductor factory on the Moon by around 2040.

According to Kyodo News, on September 10, Shun'ichi Koike, President of Rapidus, delivered a speech at the Hudson Institute in the United States, proposing the idea: constructing a semiconductor factory on the Moon by around 2040. He played a video generated by AI depicting a lunar factory, stating, "This is not a joke—it's a serious long-term vision," and jokingly added that Elon Musk would likely like this proposal.

He cited theoretical justifications for building on the Moon: chip manufacturing requires numerous processes that demand a high vacuum environment, and the Moon naturally provides such an environment. Building semiconductor fabrication facilities on the Moon would eliminate the need to construct massive vacuum chambers, implying significant savings on vacuum equipment costs.

(He mentioned only the potential savings on vacuum equipment, but said nothing about the cost of transporting construction materials from Earth—costs measured per gram—which far exceed the savings he claimed on vacuum equipment.)

He also noted that chip manufacturing requires vast amounts of ultra-pure water for wafer cleaning. This happens to be another advantage of the Moon: water ice exists in its permanently shadowed regions, theoretically allowing local extraction and purification, thus avoiding the need to transport all water from Earth.

(This is pure nonsense. The existence of water ice on the Moon remains theoretical; whether it can be mined or used at all is still unknown, let alone how much might be available.)

(In other words, even if water ice were present on the Moon, could be extracted, and used in semiconductor manufacturing, the equipment needed for mining would have to be transported from Earth—making the transportation cost vastly exceed the value of the ice and water itself. Even theoretically, such extraction and usage lack practical feasibility.)

The most critical point is the Moon’s gravity, which is one-sixth that of Earth’s. Theoretically, this reduced gravity could minimize deformation of wafers during processing, potentially benefiting the production of extremely high-precision advanced chips.

(Again, this is purely theoretical. Theory does not equate to practice—some theories remain confined to theory and never become reality.)

In industrial manufacturing, cost is always paramount. Without controlling costs, no matter how good a product may be, it cannot be widely adopted or scaled up.

At current technological levels, transporting equipment from Earth to the Moon incurs costs that grow geometrically.

An advanced wafer fab requires tens of thousands of tons of equipment. With today’s rocket payload capacity and assuming one launch per day, it would take roughly a year to transport all equipment to the Moon. But the problem is: even all spacefaring nations combined couldn’t produce enough rockets to achieve this, not to mention the astronomical cost involved. And that’s before considering the additional cost of shipping finished chips back to Earth—effectively doubling the logistics expense.

Even if all equipment arrived safely on the Moon, how would it be installed and operated? Would it be manned or unmanned?

Current technology is nowhere near capable of achieving this.

He talked only about the Moon’s vacuum environment and availability of ice-water—but ignored how the Moon’s harsh environment would severely damage precision manufacturing like chips.

The Moon experiences temperature swings exceeding 300°C between day and night. Precision photolithography equipment is extremely sensitive to temperature fluctuations. Manufacturing highly precise devices under such extreme thermal variation is pure fantasy.

Not to mention cosmic rays and solar wind directly interfering with chips and damaging delicate instruments.

Additionally, lunar dust is extremely fine, electrically charged, and highly abrasive. Once it enters a production line, wafers would be instantly ruined.

Let alone building such an advanced wafer factory—given humanity’s current technological capabilities, constructing even a small observation outpost with just a few people on the Moon would be nearly impossible, let alone a high-precision manufacturing facility.

Rapidus was jointly established in 2022 by the Japanese government and eight companies including Toyota and Sony, with IBM as a technical partner. Its goal is to overcome challenges in 2nm/1nm advanced chip development. Currently, its core mission is to establish an Earth-based 2nm wafer fab in Hokkaido.

He says this isn’t a joke—indeed, it’s not a joke. Jokes can sometimes become real. But this is delusion.

Original source: toutiao.com/article/1876119490793483/

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are those of the author.