The Chip — The hardest thing humans make in bulk

A modern processor packs tens of billions of transistors onto a piece of silicon the size of a fingernail. Building one takes hundreds of steps across several months, in a room where the air is cleaner than an operating theatre. Almost no company does all of it. Some design, some fabricate, some package.

• The split is deliberate. Fabless firms design chips and pay a foundry to build them, because a leading-edge factory now costs well over twenty billion dollars.
• The most advanced lithography machines come from one company, in one country. Concentration like that is a supply chain and a foreign policy at the same time.