The Chip Chain.

Nobody here is protesting silicon. This is a record of how few hands hold the thing they keep calling inevitable.

Every AI accelerator on Earth — the chips that train the humanoids, run the agent farms, and power the models aimed at your job — passes through the same four stages. It is designed by a fabless company that owns no factory. It is etched by a foundry. It is packaged onto memory. Then it ships to a data center. At every stage, the list of companies that can do the work is short. At the leading edge, it is a single name.

One company, TSMC, fabricates roughly seventy percent of all outsourced chips and effectively all of the advanced ones — from one island, about a hundred miles from a military adversary, on energy it imports almost entirely. One company, ASML, makes the only machines on Earth that can print transistors small enough to matter. The replacement isn't a tidal wave. It runs through a chain, and you can see exactly where that chain is thin.