Vox explains 'Why China is losing the microchip war'

While U.S.-China tensions are high because of a balloon, there are other important issues between the two largest economies. Vox examines one of them in Why China is losing the microchip war.

And why the US and China are fighting over silicon in the first place.
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In October 2022, the Biden administration placed a large-scale ban on the sale of advanced semiconductor chips to China. They also implemented a series of other rules that prevents China from making these chips on their own. These chips are used in everyday technology, like our mobile phones and computers. They’re also crucial to military and intelligence systems, which is one of the main reasons they're at the center of a feud between the United States and China.

Microchips were first invented in the US in the 1950s, after which their use rapidly expanded worldwide. Since then, the supply chain for these chips has grown and spread to include countries in Europe and Asia. And while some countries have caught up to the US's edge in making these advanced chips, China still falls far behind despite multiple attempts to gain an advantage.

Watch the latest episode of Vox Atlas to understand why China is losing a new cold war with the US over microchips.

The chip shortage is not just about consumer goods. It's also about national security. To elaborate, I'm being a good environmentalist and recycling.

Ugh, the U.S.-China trade war. I wrote about how it might accelerate the Retail Apocalypse, restrict U.S. access to Chinese rare earths, reduce GDP and increase inflation, trigger a recession, threaten...Family Dollar, and cause Dollar Tree to increase prices, but I didn't expect it would show up in this story, yet here it is. This entire story serves as another example of everything is connected to everything else and there is no free lunch; mess with some part of a system and the effects will move through all the connections at rates and sizes ranging from ripples to cascades. In this case, it looked more like a cascade.

This video shows even more of the connections, as well as the role technology plays in national security. Welcome to science fiction times.