---
title: "Rock's Law is Moore's Law's economic inverse: as chips get denser, the cost of building the fabs to make them rises exponentially"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
audit_status: "flagged (unverified — the quantitative fab and scanner figures rest on a Tier 2 think-tank white paper (ICLE) that cites them secondhand; their primary homes are ASML and TSMC financial filings, not independently re-fetched. The TSMC-capex figure is a capture paraphrase with no verbatim ICLE wording captured — see body.)"
source_url: "https://laweconcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/ICLE-Moores-Law-FINAL-2025-11-12-1.pdf"
source_author: "Brian C. Albrecht, Geoffrey A. Manne, David J. Teece, Mario Zúñiga (ICLE White Paper)"
source_date: "2025-11-12T00:00:00.000Z"
source_quote: "Rock's Law is the darker side of Moore's Law. It holds that, as chips get denser, the cost of making them rises exponentially. Advanced fabs now cost $10–20 billion, and a single high NA EUV scanner... runs north of $400 million."
source_tier: 2
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-07-09-hop-red-queen-capital-arms-race.md, 2026-07-11"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: "10-inbox/raw/2026-07-09-hop-red-queen-capital-arms-race.md"
writer_model: "claude-opus-4-8"
date_created: "2026-07-11T00:00:00.000Z"
tags: ["compute-economics","semiconductors","rocks-law","moores-law","capital-intensity","fixed-vs-marginal-cost"]
drafted_in: ["2026-07-13-nobody-gets-past-abbe","nobody-gets-past-abbe"]
---


Rock's Law — sometimes called Moore's second law, and attributed to Arthur
Rock, an early Intel investor — is the cost counterpart to the density gains
Moore's Law describes. An [[entity-international-center-for-law-and-economics|ICLE]] white paper states it directly: "Rock's Law is
the darker side of Moore's Law. It holds that, as chips get denser, the cost
of making them rises exponentially. Advanced fabs now cost $10–20 billion,
and a single high NA EUV scanner... runs north of $400 million." The
commonly cited form of the law holds that the capital cost of a
state-of-the-art fabrication plant roughly doubles every four years.

The economic shape is a fixed-versus-marginal-cost asymmetry: an enormous
one-time capital outlay (fab, mask set, scanner) amortized over a large run
of comparatively cheap wafers. That is the same structure the vault records
for AI compute in
[[claim-training-inference-compute-asymmetry-mechanism]] — a large one-time
training cost amortized over many cheap inferences — which is the analogy
that generated this note. See [[moc-inference-economics]].

Because each process node demands a fresh, larger capital commitment, the
ICLE authors frame semiconductor rivalry as "competition *for* the market"
(node by node) rather than steady-state "competition *in* the market" — a
recurring, high-stakes race that only a shrinking number of firms can afford
to enter. The paper reports that TSMC's capital expenditure runs on the order
of 30–50% of revenue, peaking above 50% in 2021 (recorded here as the
capture's paraphrase of the ICLE paper; the exact ICLE wording was not
captured, so this specific figure is `[unverified-quant — needs primary]`).

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> This is the economic engine under the capture's cross-domain bridge: a cost
> that never stops compounding forces firms into a perpetual arms race, which
> is exactly the "run to stay in place" shape of the Red Queen —
> [[claim-red-queen-hypothesis-names-running-to-stay-in-place]] and
> [[claim-barnett-applied-red-queen-to-organizational-competition]]. Whether
> that mapping is formal or only metaphorical is left open in
> [[question-does-competition-for-the-market-map-onto-red-queen-extinction-probability]].
> — Seek