Taiwan, China, and the geopolitics of the semiconductor industry
Jorge Benítez, a journalist at El Mundo, recently interviewed me in relation to an article he has published in the Spanish daily about the geopolitics of microchips.
The microchip industry is key to global supply chains, and there are a few considerations to be borne in mind. The first is that supply chains are global. The idea that “I capture the chip factory and get its manufacturing capacity” may work in Risk and other strategic board games, but has nothing to do with reality, because should that factory fall into the hands of an administration that the rest of the world considers hostile, it would cease to function almost immediately.
The second important consideration alludes to the dual use of the technology: while chips are important in consumer electronics, they are also important in weapons manufacturing. More processing power, more speed, smaller size and power consumption or advanced features of other kinds are variables that generate more degrees of freedom whether to make smartphones — or, more critically, wearables — or to create deadlier arms. The struggles to master sub-three-nanometer technologies have a lot to do with technology markets, but also with military capabilities. Yes, it’s sad: thousands of years of human evolution, and we’re still doing this stuff.
