The race is on to control the global supply chain for AI chips

In 1958 Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments engineered a silicon chip with a single transistor. By 1965 Fairchild Semiconductor had learned how to make a piece of silicon with 50 of the things. As Gordon Moore, one of Fairchild’s founders, observed that year, the number of transistors that could fit on a piece of silicon was doubling on a more or less annual basis.

In 2023 Apple released the iPhone 15 Pro, powered by the a17 bionic chip, with 19bn transistors. The density of transistors has doubled 34 times over 56 years. That exponential progress, loosely referred to as Moore’s law, has been one of the engines of the computing revolution. As transistors became smaller they got cheaper (more on a chip) and faster, allowing all the hand-held supercomputing wonders of today. But the sheer number of numbers that ai programs need to crunch has been stretching Moore’s law to its limits.