As you are all aware, Nvidia is the main company that supplies chips to the AI market, however they aren’t the only company that can as others(such as Huawei) produce near equivalent chips. However Nvidia don’t actually make the chips but own the rights to the chips. The chips are produced by TMSC and others.
TMSC isn’t this one company they rely on however, Samsung and others can produce semiconductors for chips for Nvidia and other companies, however both TMSC and Samsung rely on one company that produces the machines that produce semiconductors.
That company is ASML, it is the sole producer of the machines that produce semiconductors. They control who can produce chipsets in general and if they were to falter, the ramifications would pop the bubble and tank all tech companies.
Thankfully neither TMSC nor ASML are part of the AI bubble as money only flows one way from Nvidia and others → TMSC, Samsung and others → ASML and so asset holdings don’t inflate. Furthermore TMSC, Samsung and ASML are heavily backed by the states they work in(TMSC backed by Taiwan, Samsung backed by South Korea[and Samsungs non tech options that make up 25% of the South Korean economy] and ASML backed by Netherlands and the EU) so they are too big to fail.
But it’s interesting to see how there is this massive bottleneck is what is responsible for holding up the entire tech industry including crypto and AI, so what do you think about this arrangement?