New Yorker: The global chip supply chain is humanity's greatest collective achievement
anselm · x · 2026-10-31
Tim O'Reilly shares a New Yorker long-read by Gideon Lewis-Kraus calling the semiconductor supply chain a "planetary superorganism" and arguably humanity's greatest collective achievement — a fingernail-sized chip replicates a metro-scale city at atomic precision, stamped out by the billions to power phones, cars, and the AI economy. The piece pushes back on the zero-sum framing of globalization: only intercontinental cooperation could pull off engineering this complex. As one investor puts it, rockets are maybe a five in complexity; semiconductors are an eleven.
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