Can a Start-Up Make Computer Chips Cheaper Than the Industry’s Giants?
Substrate, a San Francisco company, is trying to take on powerhouses like the Dutch company ASML.
Tripp MickleMike Kai Chen
By Tripp Mickle
Photographs by Mike Kai Chen
Reporting from San Francisco
Oct. 28, 2025Updated 9:19 a.m. ET
In March, James Proud, an unassuming British-born American without a college degree, sat in Vice President JD Vance’s office and explained how his Silicon Valley start-up, Substrate, had developed an alternative manufacturing process for semiconductors, one of the most fundamental and difficult challenges in tech.
For the past decade, semiconductors have been manufactured by a school-bus-size machine that uses light to etch patterns onto silicon wafers inside sterile, $25 billion factories. The machine, from the Dutch company ASML, is so critical to the chips in smartphones, A.I. systems and weaponry that Washington has effectively blocked sales of it to China.
But Mr. Proud said his company, which has received more than $100 million from investors, had developed a solution that would cut the manufacturing cost in half by channeling light from a giant instrument known as a particle accelerator through a tool the size of a car. The technique had allowed Substrate to print a high-resolution microchip layer comparable to images produced by the world’s leading semiconductor plants.
“When did you do this?” Mr. Vance asked, according to Kyrsten Sinema, the former Arizona senator and the Substrate adviser who had arranged the meeting.
“Let’s just say I had a productive Covid, sir,” Mr. Proud said.
Substrate’s technical achievement, which has not been previously reported, builds on years of research into using particle accelerators to make semiconductors. For several decades, scientists have experimented with the machines, which speed up electrons so they hit a target at the speed of light. Some researchers have successfully printed images this way, but the process was never commercialized because of cost and reliability issues.
With construction of chip factories projected to double to $50 billion by the end of the decade, several start-ups have returned to the technology, believing it could help reduce soaring costs.
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