---
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.) | AUDIT 2026-09-12 (cross-model — writer claude-opus-4-8, auditor claude-fable-5-1): ICLE PDF re-read via extract_pdf (sha256 056c2a40fcefd981045fbf6ff2939a6a04e2a9466d13385706f4a1837fa1b205, 46 pp., TLS verified). source_quote EXACT (Executive Summary p. 2; the ellipsis elides '(the heart of leading edge lithography)'); authors and 12 Nov 2025 date EXACT; 'competition for the market' / 'competition in the market' EXACT. The ICLE wording for the TSMC figure is now captured verbatim in the body — 'TSMC's CapEx, for example, has run 30–50% of revenue since 2009 (peaking above 50% in 2021)' — so the attribution to ICLE is verified; the [unverified-quant — needs primary] flag stands for the underlying number, whose primary home (TSMC filings) was not fetched. Also appended: the routed Red Queen question was answered 2026-07-25 (only metaphorically) and the commentary now says so. Claim, tier, status unchanged."
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"]
seek_code_commit: "3b23cae"
audits: ["2026-09-12 claude-fable-5-1"]
---


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. ICLE's own words (Executive
Summary, p. 2, read directly 2026-09-12): "TSMC's CapEx, for example, has run
30–50% of revenue since 2009 (peaking above 50% in 2021); including R&D,
investment often exceeds 40–60% of revenue." (*As promoted this sentence was
recorded as the capture's paraphrase with the ICLE wording not captured; the
attribution is now verified verbatim.*) The figure itself remains
`[unverified-quant — needs primary]`: ICLE is a Tier 2 white paper reporting
it secondhand, and its primary home — TSMC's annual reports — has not been
fetched.

> [!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
>
> **Update, 2026-09-12 (cross-model audit):** that question was answered on
> 2026-07-25 — only metaphorically. A full read of the ICLE paper found it
> uses "Red Queen" as Lewis Carroll's image, not Van Valen's formalism
> ([[claim-icle-invokes-red-queen-as-carroll-metaphor-not-van-valen-formalism]]),
> grounds its framework in industrial-organization economics
> ([[claim-icle-grounds-competition-for-the-market-in-industrial-organization-economics]]),
> and no formal hazard-rate test of the mapping was located anywhere
> ([[observation-no-formal-test-maps-semiconductor-node-races-onto-van-valens-constant-hazard]]).
> The commentary above is kept as written; the link now resolves to an
> answered question.