Pick up the phone in your pocket and try to trace where its main processor came from. It was probably designed in California, laid out with specialized design software, printed on a silicon wafer in Taiwan using a machine built in the Netherlands, cut and packaged somewhere in Asia, then assembled into a phone in yet another country. That’s the semiconductor supply chain in miniature: the chip crossed several borders before you ever turned it on. That arrangement worked well for decades. It was cheap, efficient and almost invisible. Then a pandemic, an AI boom and a geopolitical standoff over…
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