When the United States expanded export controls on advanced semiconductors in October 2022, the stated goal was to slow China's military capabilities. Eighteen months later, the controls have achieved something more complex and harder to reverse: a permanent fracture in the global supply chain that once made chips cheaper for everyone.
TSMC, Samsung, and Intel are now building parallel capacity on three continents simultaneously — not because the economics demand it, but because governments do. The cost premium for geopolitically 'safe' chips is estimated at 30 to 50 percent over the next decade.
The irony is that the technology most dependent on this supply chain — AI — is simultaneously the technology most likely to accelerate the redesign of it.