Andrew Lee
Challenge and Opportunity
The intelligent and autonomous functioning of physical machinery is one of the key societal developments of the 21st century, changing and assisting in the way we live our lives. In this context, semiconductors, once a niche good, now form the physical backbone of automated and intelligent systems. The supply chain disruptions of 2020 laid bare the vulnerability of the global economy in the face of a chip shortage, which created scarcity and inflation in everything from smartphones to automobiles. In an even more extreme case, a lack of chips could impact critical infrastructure, such as squeezing the supply of medical devices necessary for many modern procedures.
The deployment of partially- or fully-automated warfighting further means that the deployment of Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems now has direct and inescapable impacts on national security. With great power conflict opening on the horizon, threats toward and emanating from the semiconductor supply chain have become even more evident.
In this context, the crucial role of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in chip production represents a clear and present danger to global security. Although the PRC currently trails in the production of cutting-edge sub-16 nm chips used for the development of AI models, the country’s market dominance in the field of so-called “trailing edge chips” of 28 nm or above has a much wider impact due to their ubiquity in all traditional use cases outside of AI.
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