The Invisible Trillion · Sand, Light, and the World’s Most Precise Factories

Where All This Happens

Here’s a fact that matters more than it should: the number of places in the world that can make the most advanced chips is very small.

TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company), on the island of Taiwan, makes about 90% of the world’s most advanced chips. Their most advanced fabs — the ones making 3-nanometer chips in 2026 — are mostly clustered in the Hsinchu Science Park in northern Taiwan. One island, a couple of industrial parks, a large fraction of the world’s leading-edge computing.

Samsung, in South Korea, is the main competitor to TSMC at the leading edge and makes a large share of the world’s memory chips. Their fabs are in Pyeongtaek and a few other sites in South Korea.

Intel makes its own chips in fabs in Arizona, Oregon, New Mexico, Ireland, and Israel. Intel used to be the world leader in manufacturing technology; they have fallen behind TSMC and Samsung over the last decade and are trying to catch back up.

SMIC (Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation), in China, makes less-advanced chips in large volume, and is slowly pushing into more advanced nodes despite being cut off from buying EUV machines by US export controls.

ASML, in the Netherlands, makes the lithography machines that all of the above depend on.

Zeiss SMT, in Germany, makes the optics for ASML’s machines.

If you drew a map of “places a modern chip’s existence depends on,” it would be a handful of dots: Taiwan, South Korea, the Netherlands, Germany, the US West Coast and Israel. That’s it. Everything else — the software, the chemicals, the inspection equipment — is distributed. But the chokepoints, the places where a fire or an earthquake or a war could take down the whole industry, are in those few dots.

This is why you have probably heard, in the news, a lot of talk about Taiwan, about US chip subsidies (the CHIPS Act in 2022), about export controls on EUV machines to China, about new fabs being built in Arizona and Ohio. The geopolitics of chips is not a weird niche topic. It is one of the central issues of our time, and most people’s picture of it is vague. The concentration of manufacturing in a few places that are, in various ways, fragile — Taiwan’s proximity to China; Korea’s proximity to North Korea; the Netherlands’ dependence on a single company — is a story that is going to keep being in the news for your entire life.

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