Semiconductors

Semiconductors are the chips underneath computing and AI. In this wiki the subject shows up less as a technology than as a chokepoint: a handful of firms and places that the rest of the economy depends on. The pages that cite it share a few threads.

• Concentration and geopolitics. On TBPN — August 5, 2025, Kyle discusses a Contrary Research deep dive, “Building an American TSMC,” and the argument that the US depends on Taiwan for 90%+ of advanced semiconductors, “probably the dumbest bottleneck we could possibly be in.” Real Men Have Global Fabs makes the same point from the market side: TSMC holds 70%+ of foundry share in Q2 2026 on under 43% of top-six foundry capacity, which the piece reads as pricing power rather than volume, and it argues GlobalFoundries is the leading “non-China, non-Taiwan” foundry. Tariff Armageddon and the GPU Loopholes follows how tariffs and customs classification touch GPUs.
• Why it is hard to rebuild. Inside TSMC’s Arizona Expansion attributes the Phoenix delays to culture rather than capital or technology. The Looming Labor Crisis in Chip Design argues the real bottleneck is brainpower in chip design, not geopolitics, and a saved tweet makes the same point about talent: SanDisk replacing Atlassian in the Nasdaq-100, set against US electrical-engineering bachelor’s degrees falling from 24,547 (1986-87) to 16,914 (2020-21) while computer science grew from roughly 39k to 109k.
• The physics. The Transistor Cliff reports that the cost per transistor stopped falling in 2011, that thermodynamic and photolithographic walls arrive around 2030, and that memory bandwidth, not compute, is the live bottleneck. See also Moore’s Law.
• History and primers. A saved thread on Chris Miller’s Chip War covers the profession of human “computers,” and why the Soviets built an integrated circuit soon after the US yet produced no notable chip companies. Another saved post is a three-page one-pager on chip types, how a chip is made, Moore’s law and industry history.
• Reading queue. The anti-library cards Focus: The ASML Way, Chokepoints, The Thinking Machine and Morris Chang’s Autobiography are the books on this theme (lithography monopoly, export controls, Nvidia’s rise and TSMC’s founding). Command of Commerce also links here.

Related entities: ASML, Intel, AMD, Taiwan, Compute, fabless. The price of compute is the question under Discourse: Why Compute Might Get 10x More Expensive.

Where this appears

Saved tweets

• 1. This Week, My Good… (tweet)
• I Tried to Make a… (tweet)
• Today SanDisk Replaced Atlassian… (tweet)

Long reads: Inside TSMC’s Arizona Expansion, The Looming Labor Crisis in Chip Design, Real Men Have Global Fabs, Tariff Armageddon and the GPU Loopholes, The Transistor Cliff

Podcasts: TBPN — August 5, 2025

Anti-library: Focus: The ASML Way, Chokepoints, The Thinking Machine, Morris Chang’s Autobiography, Command of Commerce

Discourse: Discourse: Why Compute Might Get 10x More Expensive

• Empires of AI — chips as the US’s advantage and China’s bottleneck.