Latest issue
The Subsidiary Loophole Is Closing — and the Real Enforcement Fight Is Just Beginning
6/13/2026
A customs seizure in Keelung changed the calculus. Earlier this month, Taiwanese authorities found roughly 50 AI servers loaded with high-end Nvidia chips, allegedly routed through Japan and Hong Kong toward mainland China. The smuggling case was brazen enough to accelerate a pol…
Recent posts
Two stories broke this week that, on the surface, look unrelated. One is about export controls. The other is about memory chips. Together, they describe the same underlying problem…
No sources were available for this week's issue. Per editorial policy, that means writing shorter and saying less rather than dressing up inference as fact. What follows is analysi…
The European Union sanctioned a Chinese semiconductor supplier. Then, weeks later, moved to unsanction it. The timeline here is not a typo. Bloomberg reported that the European Com…
Seven months from now, a construction deadline expires that no one in the chip industry wants to talk about publicly — because the moment they do, they have to explain why they hav…
The Trump administration recently approved Nvidia's H200 GPU for export to China — a chip one tier below the restricted H100 — while simultaneously watching Beijing instruct state-…
The CHIPS Act was always a bet. The federal government would front billions in grants and equity to domestic chipmakers, and in return, those companies would deliver the manufactur…
TSMC spent years telling investors that High-NA EUV was the inevitable next step in chipmaking. Then, on April 22nd, the company quietly revised that story: it can produce its next…
The Bureau of Industry and Security just handed Applied Materials a $252 million penalty for illegally routing semiconductor manufacturing equipment through South Korea to a Chines…
The standard excuse for any delayed fab project is complexity: American labor rules, local permitting, supply chain friction, the sheer difficulty of transplanting semiconductor ma…
The most telling detail in this week's semiconductor news isn't a yield number or a funding announcement. It's a booking pattern: TSMC's Arizona Fab 4, which won't produce chips un…
The semiconductor industry runs on one reliable constant: things take longer than promised. Fabs slip. Yields disappoint. Governments announce funding that arrives years late, if a…
The most telling data point in semiconductor industrial policy right now isn't a milestone hit. It's a divergence: one company is accelerating, one is stalling, and the third is si…
