For practical purposes, the M1 Ultra acts like a single, impossibly large slice of silicon that does it all. Apple's most powerful chip to date has 114 billion transistors packed into over a hundred processing cores dedicated to logic, graphics, and artificial intelligence, all of it connected to 128 gigabytes of shared memory. But the M1 Ultra is in fact a Frankenstein's monster, consisting of two identical M1 Max chips bolted together using a silicon interface that serves as a bridge. This clever design makes it seem as if the conjoined chips are in fact just one larger whole. As it becomes more difficult to shrink transistors in size, and impractical to make individual chips much bigger, chipmakers are beginning to stitch components together to boost processing power.

Inside a large clean room in rural Connecticut, engineers have begun constructing a critical component for a machine that promises to keep the tech industry as we know it on track for at least another decade. The machine is being built by ASML, a Dutch company that has cornered the market for etching the tiniest nanoscopic features into microchips with light. ASML introduced the first extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines for mass production in 2017, after decades spent mastering the technique. The machines perform a crucial role in the chipmaking ecosystem, and they have been used in the manufacture of the latest, most advanced chips, including those in new iPhones as well as computers used for artificial intelligence. The company's next EUV system, a part of which is being built in Wilton, Connecticut, will use a new trick to minimize the wavelength of light it uses--shrinking the size of features on the resulting chips and boosting their performance--more than ever before.