Materials innovation has a scale-up problem, not discovery

# Summary Materials needed for future technologies in AI, quantum computing, and energy are already discovered but cannot be manufactured at production scale—the real bottleneck is not invention but scaling up manufacturing. Intel's decade-long effort to produce hafnium-based dielectrics illustrates this challenge: the material itself wasn't the breakthrough, but rather learning to manufacture it reliably at scale in 2007. The scale-up problem persists because materials exist within complex device structures with interconnected design variables that are difficult to simulate and optimize.