US export controls as economic warfare
Washington restricted access to chipmaking equipment such as lithography and EDA tools. These controls became a deliberate weapon to slow China's technological rise.
Chip War
6 ideas
The globalized fragile supply chain
Chip production depends on extreme division of labor: Dutch lithography, American design, Taiwanese fabrication. No single nation can replicate the whole chain alone.
Computing Power, Not Oil, Now Determines Power
Military and economic dominance now depends on access to advanced computation more than on raw materials. The US won the Cold War partly because precision-guided weapons and superior electronics offset Soviet numerical advantage. The USSR could steal chip designs but could not copy the production ecosystem fast enough to keep pace. The same logic now drives US efforts to keep China a few process generations behind.
Moore's Law as Relentless Manufacturing Treadmill
Transistor density roughly doubles every two years, but only because firms keep making huge capital bets on ever-harder processes. Falling behind by a generation or two becomes nearly impossible to reverse, because each node depends on tacit manufacturing know-how and a global supplier network that money alone cannot buy. Seen this way, chip leadership is a question of whether you can keep the treadmill running, not whether you own a single invention.
Chokepoints: Single-Supplier Nodes as Geopolitical Leverage
The chip supply chain has become so specialized that key steps are concentrated in one or a handful of firms: ASML for EUV lithography machines, TSMC for leading-edge fabrication, and a few US firms for design software. Export controls on these points work as a weapon more precise than sanctions on whole economies.
Morris Chang Founds TSMC's Pure-Play Foundry
TSMC manufactured chips only for other companies and never designed its own, so customers could trust it not to compete with them. This let fabless designers like Nvidia, Qualcomm and Apple flourish, and it left Taiwan making roughly 90% of the world's most advanced logic chips.