On the way to the Hilton Garden Hotel.

Su Yehao and Mr. Zhang talked the whole way. After seeing them settled into their rooms, they continued chatting about future development plans in the hotel's small bar.

The reason Zhang Rujing suggested securing orders first, before making a major investment, wasn't due to a lack of understanding of the industry, but rather because he understood it too well, which made him a little worried.

The current chip foundry market isn't saturated yet, but with several new wafer foundries under construction, future capacity seems quite abundant.

For example, the recent DRAM from Japan, Korea, and the United States.

With the backing of American capital, it has now surpassed its Japanese counterparts, forcing several major Japanese manufacturers to join forces and form the "Elpida" company that Su Yehao had seen in the data.

Huajing in mainland China uses Japanese technology, and its wafer foundry is already behind the times as soon as it goes into production.

Huahong in Shanghai also put into production 64M DRAM memory chips in February of this year. The current situation is that they lose money for every chip they sell, and there's no hope of turning things around.

By the way.

Under the recommendation of Academician Ni Da Nan, the Huang Diamond computer being prepared for assembly used DRAM chips produced by Huahong, which also used Japanese technology.

To date, the lithography light source has been stuck at 193 nanometers for twenty years.

Countless scientists and industry players have been researching and discussing solutions to surpass 193 nanometers, but none have succeeded.

This has led to a situation where, as long as a company is willing to spend money, the starting points are actually similar, and the competition is about yield rate and scale, earning a little hard-earned money from it. The number of foundries continues to increase, and the competitive situation is severe.

Therefore, Zhang Rujing prefers to wait until he sees the rabbit before letting the hawk fly, planning to wait until there are signs of orders.

Back in the 1980s, TSMC first obtained a small number of foundry orders from Intel, and then slowly accumulated its strength to soar into the sky.

In July of this 1999.

The competitive pressure in the foundry industry is much greater than when TSMC first started in the 1980s, which means it must be even more careful.

All that can be said about this is that Zhang Rujing has been dealing with other investors for too long, and he knows nothing about Su Yehao's wealth and generosity.

The business has clearly not even started yet, but Su Yehao has already prepared to invest 10 billion US dollars over ten years, and write it off if it's all lost... This alone is far from what others can compare with.

Based on the market scale of the next twenty years, if the technology and scale are improved, it may not be easy to lose money, but rather a question of how much to earn.

The cake is so big that even occupying only a part of it is enough for him to recover his current investment with interest.

...

He clearly explained his optimism about the future market, and conveyed the development concept of "don't save money, just do it" to Zhang Rujing.

After hearing that the other party agreed to contact Canon, Nikon, and ASML to see who would be willing to provide technology and jointly establish a lithography research laboratory, Su Yehao was satisfied.

The so-called joint venture refers to a third party providing technical support, Su Yehao taking out research and development funds, and building a lithography research and development center around the idea proposed by Vietnamese-American scientist Lin Baojian.

Although it is inevitable to spend money, after chatting with Zhang Rujing and others, he felt a little more confident.

Not to mention anything else, it is easy to buy current lithography machines. Once a wafer foundry is built in the mainland, the gap will not be too large in the short term.

Considering that the Internet winter is coming, seize this opportunity and bet on the development of foundry and lithography research and development. At least the hope of overtaking on a curve can be seen, and it is not particularly slim...

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The next morning.

Su Yehao was afraid that Yin Liuli would be bored, so he took her to visit Qualcomm with the team.

Qualcomm originally planned to take the route of self-production and self-sales. Later, they were overwhelmed with collecting patent fees. Faced with the concerns of customers, and in order to avoid being sued for monopoly, they decisively decided to transfer the mobile phone production business as a whole.

Representatives from Goldman Sachs Group, who had cooperated with them, were responsible for the matchmaking. After learning that Su Yehao had arrived in person, Qualcomm's Chief Operating Officer and Chief Technology Officer jointly received them.

Qualcomm's mobile phone is called pdQ, which has a flippable keyboard and is equipped with a 160*240 resolution LCD screen, a 16MHz processor, and 2MB of memory. It also supports Palm OS applications.

In simple terms, it has an operating system and also supports surfing the Internet, which is equivalent to allowing a handheld computer to make phone calls, providing a maximum Internet speed of 14.4kbps, allowing users to browse emails anytime, anywhere.

When it was launched last year, it shocked many peers, but the high price of 800 US dollars and the gimmicky functions made it difficult for this product to make money.

As a result, everyone was scrambling to buy the base station business spun off from Qualcomm, but the mobile phone production business was lukewarm. Many people asked about the price, but no one actually made a move.

Nokia, Motorola, and other companies didn't like it, and the smaller companies that did like it were reluctant to spend the money.

This sale is a way for Qualcomm to turn garbage assets into cash. The executives who accompanied the tour of the research and development laboratory were exceptionally enthusiastic, deliberately skipping over sales and inventory conditions, and focusing on describing the advanced performance of the products.

At this moment.

An Indian-American senior engineer named Sanjay Jha helped demonstrate the online surfing function being developed, which uses the next generation of new technology to browse emails and web pages faster.

Su Yehao waved his hand indifferently and said:

"Before the 3G mobile network is truly popular, I don't think so many people need to go online. It's a very promising technology, but with its current functions, it's difficult to attract enough customers. Sales have proven this, without a doubt. What I'm interested in this time is the complete mobile phone production solution, and the supporting services provided by your company. Give me a fair price, what's the lowest you're willing to sell it to me for?"

Qualcomm's Chief Operating Officer, Gray, told him calmly: "Two hundred million US dollars. We have signed long-term cooperation agreements with Verizon Communications and others, and it will be easy to sell our products to the United States in the future."

Su Yehao gave a calm reply and shrugged:

"I can agree, provided that you give me 30% of your chip foundry orders. This price is simply unreasonable. You have to know that if I use your solutions to develop and produce mobile phones, I can open up the Asian market for your company, especially the Chinese market. From a long-term perspective, I think eighty million US dollars is a reasonable number..."