The Silicon Heart of the Matter
At the very core of this whole affair are the chips. You can’t have artificial intelligence without the specialised silicon that does the thinking. This brings us to a company like Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, or TSM. They are the master craftsmen, the only foundry capable of producing the most advanced chips that Nvidia designs. Their position is, frankly, astonishing.
But the supply chain goes deeper. TSM, for all its prowess, relies on another company, ASML, which makes the ridiculously complex lithography machines needed to etch the chip designs. These machines cost hundreds of millions of pounds each, and ASML is the only company on Earth that can make them. It’s a beautifully simple, and potentially lucrative, bottleneck. When demand for AI soars, it’s these specialists who may feel the benefit first, long before the AI applications themselves have proven their worth.