Welcome to Chip Capitols!

From 白宫 to 故宫 and beyond

Technology’s center of gravity has shifted.

Santa Clara in California, Shenzhen in China, Leuven in Belgium, Hsinchu in Taiwan. As recently as the early 2010s, these cities were the center of action for the semiconductor industry and the tech industry more broadly. Supply chain ruptures, geopolitical tensions, and a global pandemic, however, have raised the clout of political capitals in guiding technological development. And no sector tells this story better than the semiconductor industry.

Washington, D.C., Beijing, Brussels, Taipei. Capitol buildings in these cities now craft laws whose influence on the chip industry rivals that of decisions made in many company boardrooms.

Semiconductor policy is undoubtably interesting in its own right, but this newsletter is not about comprehensively analyzing every line of every chip bill introduced in every national parliament. (Your author already did his service combing through iterations of the CHIPS Act in a previous job.)

Rather, each article on Chip Capitols is a fun dive into niche policy questions arising from semiconductor policy around the world. We’ll look at how one country’s new program priorities basic versus applied research or places national security guardrails on subsidies, then compare these approaches to former attempts across borders and history. In the off-weeks between each article, I will also translate a semiconductor-related article from the People’s Daily (人民日报) to deepen our understanding of the Chinese government’s rhetoric on chip politics.

Ultimately, I hope readers will adopt my view that semiconductor policy is a dynamic lens for analyzing U.S.-China relations, industrial policy, intellectual property, and other fields more broadly.