Jan Woldstad

Twitter turns 20. What is your favorite tweet of all time?

I live in Eindhoven, ASML town. Heard this from folks inside... Over the years ASML promoted a lot of strong EUV people into architect roles, group leads, management tracks. Built up serious layers. Classic growth pain. Then McKinsey comes in , says cut the management layers to speed things up. So now those same high performers, real good EUV experts, who got promoted are the ones on the block. About 3400 roles targeted, mostly management. Half will be reassigned, rest gone. Big hit in Veldhoven/Eindhoven area (~1400), some in US. Unncertainty is high, unions talking, details probably land around April. At the same time, ASML is still planning massive growth. The new campus near the airport just got final green light from city council. Construction starts soon, phased build-out. Long term they talk ~20,000 new jobs in the region (first wave ~5k by 2028). And the layoff packages are subpar. Philips is also based in the same town. And they had layoffs due to serious financial issues last year. Their layoff packages were much better than what ASML is offering. What a way to kill tje company culture. Especially at a time when the company is printing money.

Terafab may be the most essential vertical integration Tesla has ever undertaken— and it is truly non-optional. It will take years to build and will test even Elon’s speedrunning abilities to the limit, but that won’t stop him from trying. The breakthrough likely lies in overhauling the overall facility’s cleanroom model. By moving wafers in sealed pods with localized micro-environments, the fab no longer needs a monolithic ultra-clean space. Elon’s line about “eating cheeseburgers and smoking cigars” on the fab floor isn’t silly, it’s the practical reality of a radically simpler, cheaper, faster approach that could finally change the economics of chipmaking. This is all forced by the brutal “pinch” in chip supply. Tesla must produce on the order of 100–200 billion AI chips per year just to saturate its roadmap. That volume powers: FSD cars & Robotaxis (tens of millions of vehicles needing AI5 inference for near-perfect autonomy), Physical Optimus (scaling from thousands today to millions per year, each requiring AI5/AI6-level compute), Digital Optimus (the new xAI-Tesla software agents for digital/office automation, running massive inference clusters), Space-based data centers (AI7/Dojo3 orbital compute for GW-scale training and inference beyond Earth limits). AI5 delivers the ~10× leap for vehicles and early robots; AI6 shifts focus to Optimus + terrestrial DCs; AI7 goes orbital. No external foundry (TSMC, Samsung, etc.) can deliver that scale or timeline— hence the Terafab launch. Without it, the entire robotics + autonomy future hits a brick wall. Terafab isn’t optional; it’s the only way forward.