Russia spends 1.4B rubles on a secret machine to wash microchips by 2029

The official state procurement portal posted a tender for an automated line capable of etching, cleaning, and drying silicon wafers of various diameters. This high-tech dishwasher is designed to replace American and Japanese equipment currently keeping the local chip industry on life support.

The future machine must swallow up to 100 wafers per cycle and juggle eight aggressive chemical reagents, including hydrofluoric and sulfuric acids, without accidentally creating a domestic dirty bomb. To make things even more dramatic, key components like the rotor and software must be strictly homegrown, leaving foreign parts authorized only under special permission.

The contract for this wet dream of import substitution was quietly awarded to a winner whose identity is completely classified in the official state database. This anonymous savior has until late autumn of the decade's end to deliver a working prototype, meaning the local tech sector will have to keep blowing on their dusty chips for a few more years.

This bath-time project is part of a larger government shopping spree that allocated billions for lithography and electron microscopy equipment. However, industry experts are already whispering that the current budget is barely enough to cover basic research and development, let alone set up actual production lines in cleanrooms.

Throwing pocket change at a secret contractor to build a chemical bath over several years while global tech moves at lightspeed is peak industrial planning. By the time this wet-cleaning marvel finally spins its first rotor, the chips it was designed to clean might belong in a museum next to floppy disks.