Science & technology

IBM Unveils World's First Sub-1 Nanometer Chip Technology

Is Moore's Law truly dead or has IBM's sub-1nm chip just rewritten the rules?

JUN 25·Updated JUN 30

#Science & technology

IBM Unveils World's First Sub-1 Nanometer Chip Technology

Story

Above: A robot moves chips at the IBM semiconductor packaging and testing plant in Bromont, Canada, on Sept. 22, 2023. Image credit: Andrej Ivanov/Bloomberg/Getty Images

The Facts

IBM unveiled what it describes as the world's first sub-1 nanometer (nm) chip technology on Thursday, built on a new transistor architecture at the 0.7 nm node. The chip packs nearly 100 billion transistors onto a piece of silicon roughly the size of a fingernail.
Tech Times
IBM Newsroom
IBM's new nanostack architecture vertically stacks and staggers transistors through 3D sequential integration, nearly doubling the transistor density of its 2 nm chip introduced in 2021. The design also allows different materials to be used in each layer, enabling independent tuning of performance and power for each transistor.
Interesting Engineering
Forbes
IBM projects the nanostack chip will deliver up to 50% more performance or 70% greater energy efficiency compared to its 2 nm node chips. The company also reported a 40% increase in on-chip memory, presented at the VLSI 2026 Symposium.
Engadget
IBM Newsroom
CRN
IBM's nanostack research is conducted at the Albany NanoTech Complex in New York, where a High Numerical Aperture Extreme Ultraviolet lithography tool developed by ASML is in the process of being installed. This allows more precise, smaller circuit cutting.
BBC News
CRN
PR Newswire
NY State
IBM does not manufacture commercial chips at volume but develops technology it licenses to chipmakers. Past licensees have included Samsung Electronics and Rapidus, a Japanese company aiming to produce 2 nm chips at scale by the second half of 2027.
Engadget
The New York Times
IBM says nanostack chip production could begin within five years, with its semiconductor roadmap projecting at least a decade of further scaling.
The New York Times
Ars Technica

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The Spin

Techno-skeptic narrative

Moore's Law is dead, and no amount of hype changes that. Transistor miniaturization has slowed to a crawl, and the real gains now come from smarter software, better algorithms and hardware architecture — not shrinking silicon. Chasing smaller chips is expensive, slow and increasingly hits hard physical limits, so the future belongs to performance engineering, not nanometer bragging rights.

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Techno-optimist narrative

IBM just blew past the supposed physical limits of chip scaling with the world's first sub-1 nm chip, packing nearly 100 billion transistors onto a fingernail-sized chip using a revolutionary nanostack architecture. The new design delivers up to 50% more performance or 70% greater energy efficiency than IBM's 2 nm chip. Semiconductor scaling isn't dead — it just needed a reinvention.