# Why Semiconductor Chips Have Become the World's Most Contested Resource > Author Rakesh Kumar argues chips now carry the strategic weight oil once did, with Taiwan's TSMC and the Netherlands' ASML sitting at the center of a widening US-China standoff, according to Fortune. - Source: Money Standard - Canonical URL: https://moneystandard.co.uk/article/why-semiconductor-chips-became-the-worlds-most-contested-resource - Author: Money Standard Newsroom - Section: Business - Published: 2026-08-21T20:28:09.874Z - Updated: 2026-08-21T20:28:09.874Z - Tags: Semiconductors --- Semiconductors have quietly become the resource great powers are most willing to fight over, according to an essay in Fortune by Rakesh Kumar, adapted from his book The Chip Age, How Chips Shaped Our Past and Will Define Our Future, out from Icon Books. Kumar argues that chips now occupy the strategic role once held by oil or rare wartime materials, and that the bulk of that power sits in a single, contested place. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company alone produces more than half of the world's chips and over 90 percent of the most advanced ones, giving the island an outsized grip on global technology supply. That concentration collides directly with Beijing's ambitions toward Taiwan, turning a manufacturing hub into a piece of contested territory with global economic stakes attached to it. Kumar writes that military planners have studied Operation Catapult, Britain's 1940 decision to destroy the French fleet rather than let it fall into German hands, as a grim precedent for how the United States might think about TSMC's facilities in a worst case scenario. Contingency planning reportedly extends to evacuating engineers and considering military protection for the plants themselves, underscoring how seriously chip capacity is now treated as a strategic asset rather than an ordinary industrial one. The chokepoints run deeper than Taiwan. ASML, based in the Netherlands, remains the sole maker of the extreme ultraviolet lithography machines required to produce the most advanced chips, making it another single point of failure in the global supply chain. Kumar points to a Chinese engineer accused of stealing ASML trade secrets who later fled to China and now runs his own chipmaking company, Dongfang Jingyuan Electron, as an example of how aggressively that technology is being pursued. Security around existing facilities has tightened accordingly. ASML has reportedly built remote kill switches into its equipment following simulations of a potential invasion scenario, and TSMC's Nanjing facility uses encrypted transmission lines along with a use it and immediately lose it data protocol designed to prevent sensitive information from being intercepted. Taken together, Kumar's account frames the fight over chips less as a normal trade dispute and more as a slow moving contest over who controls the infrastructure the rest of the global economy now depends on. --- Originally published by Money Standard. Free to cite with attribution and a link to https://moneystandard.co.uk/article/why-semiconductor-chips-became-the-worlds-most-contested-resource.