Globala försörjningskedjor är inte enbart en ekonomisk fråga och handlar på senare år i allt högre grad om säkerhet, makt och strategisk kontroll. Den nya boken Security and Supply – Vulnerability and Weapon av Freddy Jönsson Hanberg, chef för NATO-anknutna Security of Supply Centre of Excellence (SOSCOE) och mångårig rådgivare inom försvar och resiliens, lyfter fram flera perspektiv på hur beroenden i en allt mer fragmenterad omvärld kan blottläggas och utnyttjas.
Till boken bidrar Semi14 med en analys av halvledarkedjorna, där beroende av en region med Kina, Taiwan och Sydkorea beskrivs som en tätt sammanlänkad riskstruktur i flera lager. Vi tar även upp att lösningen för den transatlantiska länken inte är att eliminera beroenden, utan om att förstå och hantera dem, och att inte lägga alla ägg i samma korg.
Utan vidare dröjsmål följer Semi14:s kapitel – Redundans och minskat beroende av halvledare från Taiwan och Kina. Boken Security and Supply – Vulnerability and Weapon finns tillgänglig på Adlibris och landar inom kort för försäljning hos bland annat Amazon.
Redundancy and Mitigation of Dependence on Taiwanese and Chinese Semiconductors
Semiconductors constitute a system-critical foundation for modern defence capabilities, civil resilience, and societal continuity. They underpin weapons systems, command and control architectures, sensors and radar, satellite infrastructure, energy systems, and the digital services upon which military and civilian operations increasingly depend. Disruptions in semiconductor supply therefore propagate across defence readiness, civil infrastructure, and economic stability. From a security of supply perspective, the central challenge is not the elimination of dependence, but the creation of redundancy and mitigation mechanisms that reduce the strategic impact of prolonged disruption.
The semiconductor industry is characterised by extreme specialisation combined with geographic concentration. Production spans multiple technologically distinct layers – from materials and manufacturing equipment to wafer fabrication, packaging, and system integration – each marked by high capital intensity, long lead times, and limited substitutability. While this structure has enabled rapid technological progress, it has also created a system with low redundancy and high sensitivity to disruption. These vulnerabilities are most pronounced in East Asia, where a substantial share of the world’s most critical semiconductor capabilities is concentrated.
East Asia as a multi-layered risk cluster
Within East Asia, the interlinked dynamics involving China, Taiwan, South Korea, and North Korea form a tightly interconnected risk cluster rather than a collection of independent national supply chains. Dependence on Taiwanese and Chinese semiconductor ecosystems is therefore systemic, rooted in the aggregation of interdependent functions within one strategic region. The nature of this dependence varies by technological layer, shaping where redundancy can be introduced and where mitigation is inherently constrained.
At the most advanced end of the value chain, Taiwan represents a technological single point of failure. The island dominates leading-edge logic manufacturing at the most advanced nodes, widely estimated at around nine tenths of global total capacity. These chips are enablers for high-performance computing, artificial intelligence, advanced sensors, and next-generation weapons systems. This concentration places the world’s most sophisticated processors within a narrowly defined ecosystem. Any prolonged disruption would immediately constrain the development and upgrading of advanced military capabilities across NATO countries, with limited scope for short-term substitution.
Where Taiwan represents a technological bottleneck, South Korea constitutes a capacity bottleneck within the same regional system. Through Samsung and SK Hynix, the country produces around half – and in some segments a clear majority – of global memory components, including high-bandwidth memory critical for data-intensive applications. Memory and system capacity underpin both advanced military platforms and the civilian digital infrastructure upon which modern defence operations rely. Redundancy at this layer is therefore linked less to technological replacement than to parallel capacity and throughput resilience.
Beyond technological leadership and system capacity lies a third, often underappreciated layer: mature or legacy process technologies. These nodes underpin a wide range of military and civil systems where reliability and long service lives outweigh cutting-edge performance. Legacy technologies are critical for sensors, power electronics, communications equipment, and industrial control systems. In this domain, production is more geographically distributed in theory than in practice. Taiwan remains an important supplier, while China has emerged as the dominant source of volume capacity and incremental expansion, creating a dependence driven by industrial scale rather than technological uniqueness.
China adds a further upstream dimension through materials and enabling inputs. Semiconductor manufacturing and manufacturing equipment depend on critical materials, including rare earth elements used in precision components and high-performance systems. China’s dominance in the separation and refining of rare earths introduces an upstream vulnerability that can affect semiconductor supply even without direct disruption to fabrication facilities. At this layer, mitigation is shaped by regulatory exposure and time, as material constraints can propagate across the supply web with limited visibility and few short-term alternatives.
The regional risk profile is compounded by persistent security tensions on the Korean Peninsula. While North Korea is not an industrial actor in the semiconductor value chain, it functions as a destabilising factor that increases physical, cyber, and logistical risks across the region, adding fragility to an already concentrated system.
Taken together, these dynamics place a very large share of the world’s most critical semiconductor capacity – spanning leading-edge logic, memory, legacy technologies, and upstream materials – within a single strategic region. Dependence on Taiwanese and Chinese semiconductor ecosystems is therefore multi-layered, and mitigation must be understood as a gradual process rather than a binary shift.
Systemic effects of prolonged disruption
Viewed through this lens, prolonged disruption in East Asia would generate effects at different speeds and with different characteristics depending on the layer affected.
At the leading-edge and memory layers, impacts would be abrupt and highly visible. Constraints on advanced processors and memory would directly affect next-generation military systems and data-intensive civilian infrastructure that supports military operations. Here, redundancy is inherently limited, and mitigation relies primarily on prioritisation and time.
At the level of legacy technologies and upstream materials, effects would be more gradual but no less consequential. Restrictions would erode system availability over time, affecting maintenance, repair, and sustainment of existing platforms. Rather than sudden collapse, the system would experience progressive degradation of reliability and throughput. In this context, redundancy and mitigation are closely linked to endurance and industrial depth.
This distinction is critical for military planning. Armed forces depend not only on technological superiority, but on the ability to sustain systems over extended periods. Civil–military integration of digital infrastructure further amplifies these effects as disruptions propagate across shared ecosystems.
Across all layers, time emerges as the binding constraint. Semiconductor manufacturing and qualification operate on multi-year horizons, while disruption can be applied rapidly and selectively. This asymmetry favours actors capable of exerting sustained pressure across multiple layers of the supply web.
Conclusion
Semiconductors illustrate the structural challenges of security of supply in an era of strategic competition. Dependence on Taiwanese and Chinese semiconductor ecosystems reflects the geographic concentration of interdependent and largely irreplaceable functions within East Asia. This dependence is multi-layered, spanning technological leadership, system capacity, industrial volume, and upstream materials.
In this context, redundancy should not be understood as wholesale replacement, but as the deliberate addition of parallel pathways, alternative capacities, and time buffers that mitigate the strategic consequences of prolonged disruption. Effective mitigation therefore lies less in eliminating dependence than in reshaping how that dependence is absorbed over time.
