The fragile geography behind every modern device

A modern chip can pass through more than a thousand process steps and cross several countries before it reaches a finished device, which means a shortage rarely has one cause and never has one fix.

The 2021 disruption was not really about demand outstripping supply in the abstract; it was about how concentrated that supply had become in a handful of facilities running at the edge of their physical limits.

The lesson that stuck was not "build more factories," though many were built. It was that resilience and efficiency pull in opposite directions, and industries that optimized only for the second had no slack left when it mattered.