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The Semiconductor Supply Chain: Sand to AI Chip

The market prices semiconductors as a growth story. It is a concentration story, and the multiples do not reflect it.

The market prices semiconductors as a growth story. It is a concentration story.

ASML makes every EUV machine on earth. No second source. One town in North Carolina supplies much of the world's high-purity quartz. The advanced chips are made almost entirely in Taiwan. People call this an industry. It is a stack of single points of failure.

The map walks the whole pipeline: quartz and polysilicon, wafers (Shin-Etsu, SUMCO), photoresist and gases, the tools (ASML, Applied Materials, Lam, Tokyo Electron), the design software (Synopsys, Cadence), the designers (Nvidia, AMD, Apple, Qualcomm), the fabs (TSMC, Samsung, Intel, SK Hynix), and the CoWoS packaging that has quietly become the real bottleneck for AI chips.

Read it as a map of leverage. The companies with no competition are rarely the famous ones.

Companies & entities in this map

① Raw materials, ② Materials & chemicals, ③ Equipment, ④ Design tools, ⑤ Chip design, ⑥ Fabrication, ⑦ Packaging & test, ⑧ End products, High-purity quartz, Metallurgical silicon, Neon & rare gases, Helium, Fluorspar → HF, Copper, Gold, Tin, Cerium / rare earths, Electronic-grade polysilicon, Silicon wafers (300mm), Photoresist, Specialty / electronic gases, CMP slurry & pads, Sputtering targets, Photomasks & blanks, IC substrates (ABF), Bonding wire / leadframe / solder, Wet chemicals (acids/solvents), Lithography, Deposition & etch, Metrology & inspection, Clean / coat-develop track, Ion implant, Test equipment (ATE), EDA software, IP cores, Nvidia (AI GPUs), AMD, Apple Silicon, Qualcomm, Broadcom, MediaTek, Marvell, TSMC (foundry), Samsung (foundry + memory), Intel (IDM + foundry), GlobalFoundries, UMC, SMIC (EUV-blocked), SK Hynix (memory / HBM), Micron (memory), Texas Instruments (analog), Infineon (power), TSMC CoWoS (adv. packaging), ASE Technology (OSAT), Amkor (OSAT), JCET (OSAT), Powertech (mem. test/assembly), AI servers / GPUs, Smartphones, PCs & servers, Cars (chips inside), SSDs / memory modules, MOCVD / compound deposition, Mask writers & EUV-mask inspection, Dicing & wafer grinding, Bonding & adv-packaging tools, CMP & plating equipment, SiC / GaN substrates, Adv-packaging materials (underfill/TIM), Sony (image sensors), NXP (auto / embedded), Renesas (MCU / auto), Analog Devices, Microchip (MCU), onsemi (power / sensors), STMicroelectronics (IDM), Kioxia (NAND), Nanya (DRAM), Hua Hong (China mature), Tower Semiconductor, Tongfu (OSAT), King Yuan (test), Networking / optical, Sibelco, The Quartz Corp, Nordic Mining, Ferroglobe, Elkem, Wacker, Air Products

Muad'Dib Capital, the Atlas of the Physical Economy. For information only — not investment advice. Company lists are representative selections curated from public sources.

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SEMICONDUCTORS › SAND TO AI CHIP

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