From 2021, so the chip shortage may be over by now, but this is still fascinating:

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC), is the world’s largest contract manufacturer of the semiconductor chips—otherwise known as integrated circuits, or just chips—that power our phones, laptops, cars, watches, refrigerators and more. Its clients include Apple, Intel, Qualcomm, AMD and Nvidia… The $550 billion firm today controls more than half the global market for made-to-order chips and has an even tighter stranglehold on the most advanced processors, with more than 90% of market share by some estimates.

TSMC’s success in cornering this vital market has become a geostrategic migraine. The Pentagon is pressing the Biden Administration to invest more in advanced chipmaking, so its missiles and fighter jets are not dependent on a self-ruling island that China’s strongman President Xi Jinping believes is a breakaway province and has repeatedly threatened to invade. More immediately, a global chip shortage has impacted a staggering 169 industries, according to Goldman Sachs analysis, from steel and ready-mix concrete to air-conditioning units and breweries. Most drastically, automakers across America, Japan and Europe were forced to slow and even halt production, meaning 3.9 million fewer cars will roll into world showrooms this year than last.

TSMC’s dominance is such that its chief rivals are not companies but governments.

How did TMSC get there? How does the Chinese government’s feelings about Taiwan affect them (and therefore the rest of the world)? How is the United States dealing with a crucial technology monopoly that it does not own?

Making chips is so unbelievably complex and specialized that diversifying the location of fabs will make it more difficult to maintain quality. The transistor in a 3-nm node is just 1/20,000th the width of a human hair. Were you to enlarge a foot-long wafer of semiconductor to the size of the continental U.S., the required patterning for these chips would still be only the width of a thumbnail.

Full article (about 3,400 words): https://time.com/6102879/semiconductor-chip-shortage-tsmc/. Also see Making chips: 20,000,000,000,000 parts: https://laughlearnlinks.home.blog/2021/12/17/making-chips-20000000000000-parts/.