Since the outbreak of COVID-19 in the early months of 2020, the phrase “supply chain” became a catalyst of terror for America’s consumers, often demonstrated by panicked shoppers coming to blows over the last bottle of bleach, can of soup, or—worst of the worst—roll of toilet paper.
Meanwhile, the increasing scarcity of another finite resource silently rivaled every other man-made product on the planet in the context of sparking potential doom: chips.
Not the potato, but rather the integrated circuit or “semiconductor” kind: tiny pieces of silicon with countless transistors carved into them.
“Last year, the chip industry produced more transistors than the combined quantity of all goods produced by all other companies, in all other industries, in all human history,” Chris Miller writes in Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology. “Nothing else comes close.”
This unimaginable influence—and also,…
