Jide reports from the heart of the semiconductor supply chain on the machines that make the machines. Based in Taipei, he has spent a decade tracing the chokepoints the rest of the industry would rather not discuss.
When TSMC says "1.6 nanometres," it is no longer describing a transistor. It is describing a system — power fed from the back, dies stitched together on a wafer, heat that has nowhere to go. Read the node alongside the machine, or you have not read it at all.
Everyone watches the transistor count. The AI compute supply chain is actually rationed somewhere quieter — on a slab of silicon the size of a dinner plate, in a process called CoWoS, where a single company decides who gets to build the future and who waits.
