Critical Industries

Semiconductor Lithography

Why it matters

No lithography, no leading-edge chips. No leading-edge chips, no modern AI compute, no advanced weapons guidance, no 5G/6G basebands, no modern automotive ECUs. This is the single most concentrated chokepoint in modern industrial civilization.

The chokepoint

EUV (extreme-ultraviolet) lithography is required for sub-7nm process nodes. The only producer of EUV machines is ASML (Netherlands). Each machine costs ~$300M (EUV) or ~$400M (High-NA EUV). Roughly 200 EUV machines exist worldwide; production is constrained to fewer than 60/year.

Apex companies

Scholarship: Chris Miller, "Chip War" (2022) is the canonical popular treatment. SemiAnalysis (Dylan Patel) is the leading independent technical analyst.

Semiconductor Fabrication

Why it matters

A 3nm or 5nm chip is the product of a ~1,000-step process executed inside a fab costing $15–$25B to construct. Building one takes ~3–5 years. The world has ~3 companies that can produce leading-edge logic, and they are concentrated in two countries.

The chokepoint

TSMC alone produces ~90% of leading-edge (3nm, 5nm, 7nm) chips, and ~100% of the chips used by Apple, NVIDIA, AMD, and Qualcomm at the leading edge. TSMC operates principally in Taiwan, ~110 miles from mainland China. This is the single most-cited national-security concentration in US defense planning.

Apex companies

Scholarship: TSMC’s annual report and SemiAnalysis’s fab-level coverage are the public sources of record.

AI Compute and Foundation Models

Why it matters

Frontier AI training requires tens of thousands of accelerators networked together. The accelerator supplier, the networking-fabric supplier, and the cloud landlord effectively gate which organizations can train frontier models — a small list.

The chokepoint

NVIDIA holds >85% of the discrete AI-accelerator market with H100/H200/B100/B200/GB200 product lines. Its CUDA software ecosystem is a deeper moat than the silicon itself. NVLink/NVSwitch interconnect is similarly concentrated. The three major cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP) control the at-scale rental market.

Apex companies

Biotechnology, CRISPR, and Genetic Medicine

Why it matters

CRISPR-based genome editing is dual-use: it can cure sickle-cell disease (Casgevy, FDA-approved 2023) and it could in principle enable agricultural sovereignty, lineage tracing, and — at the dark end of dual-use — engineered pathogens. Biotechnology is now in roughly the position computing occupied in the 1970s. The next decade will decide who sets the rules.

The chokepoint

The IP foundations of CRISPR-Cas9 are split between the Broad Institute and UC Berkeley (the Doudna/Charpentier patents); the practical chokepoints are clinical trial throughput, capital, and GMP manufacturing of viral and lipid-nanoparticle delivery vehicles.

Apex companies

Scholarship: Walter Isaacson, "The Code Breaker" (2021) covers the Doudna story. Kevin Davies, "Editing Humanity" (2020) is the rigorous reference.

Nanotechnology and Advanced Materials

Why it matters

Nanotechnology is not a single industry; it is the substrate of modern semiconductors, drug delivery, energy storage, structural composites, sensors, and quantum devices. The leadership question is "who owns the techniques and the IP."

The chokepoint

No single chokepoint; rather, a constellation of specialist tool, material, and process companies, with cross-cutting research institutions (IBM Research, Argonne, MIT.nano, IMEC, RIKEN) sitting upstream of nearly everything.

Apex companies

Defense Prime Contractors and Aerospace

Why it matters

The visible apex of military-industrial expenditure. Defense primes integrate thousands of subcontractors into the platforms governments actually procure — fighters, missiles, ships, satellites, ICBMs, command-and-control systems.

The chokepoint

Concentration is extreme. In the United States, post-Cold-War consolidation reduced the number of major prime contractors from ~50 to ~5. A small number of platforms (F-35, B-21, Columbia-class submarine, Sentinel ICBM, Aegis) drive a disproportionate share of procurement.

Apex companies

Scholarship: SIPRI Top-100 arms producers (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute) is the canonical annual dataset.

Space and Launch

Why it matters

Whoever can put mass into orbit cheaply controls the satellite layer — communications, intelligence, navigation (GPS-equivalents), and increasingly orbital persistence. Reusable launch has collapsed the cost per kilogram by roughly 20× in a decade.

The chokepoint

SpaceX accounts for roughly 80% of mass-to-orbit worldwide. Its Starlink constellation now provides the dominant low-Earth-orbit broadband service. The Falcon 9 reuse cadence makes it structurally difficult for any competitor to close the cost gap without a comparable reusable platform.

Apex companies

Energy Storage and Batteries

Why it matters

Battery cost has fallen ~90% since 2010 and is the linchpin of electric mobility, grid storage, and increasingly defense systems (drones, autonomous platforms). Battery industrial policy is now a primary axis of US-EU-China competition.

The chokepoint

Chinese companies hold roughly 75% of global EV battery production. Cathode active material and battery-grade processed lithium, nickel, and cobalt are even more concentrated upstream.

Apex companies

Critical Minerals and Refining

Why it matters

Modern technology depends on roughly 50 elements that the US Geological Survey designates "critical" — including the rare earths, lithium, cobalt, nickel, gallium, germanium, neon, tungsten, helium, and graphite. The constraint is rarely the geology; it is the refining and processing capacity, which is heavily concentrated in China.

The chokepoint

China processes roughly 85% of global rare earth elements, 70% of cobalt, 60% of lithium, and 100% of natural graphite anode material. Gallium and germanium were placed under Chinese export controls in 2023 — the first overt weaponization of materials supply against the United States and allies.

Apex companies

Scholarship: USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries is the canonical annual reference. IEA "Critical Minerals Market Review" (annual) covers demand-side trends.

Cloud Infrastructure, Networking, and Subsea Cables

Why it matters

The cloud is where the computing happens; the networking equipment carries the bits; the subsea cables carry the bits across oceans. Whoever controls all three controls the infrastructure of digital sovereignty.

The chokepoint

Cloud is dominated by three companies. Networking equipment is split between US incumbents (Cisco, Juniper, Arista) and Chinese vendors (Huawei, ZTE) — with the latter blocked in most Western markets. Subsea cables are owned and maintained by a tiny number of consortiums; physical landing stations are obvious chokepoints.

Apex companies

Quantum Computing and Post-Quantum Cryptography

Why it matters

A sufficiently large quantum computer would break the public-key cryptography (RSA, ECDSA) that protects roughly every authenticated transaction on the internet — and the encrypted communications adversaries have been intercepting and storing for years ("harvest now, decrypt later"). The race to deploy post-quantum cryptography (NIST PQC standards finalized 2024) is national-security urgent independent of any specific quantum-computing timeline.

The chokepoint

No clear chokepoint yet on the hardware side — multiple architectures (superconducting, trapped-ion, neutral atom, photonic) remain technically viable. On the software side, NIST’s PQC standardization (CRYSTALS-Kyber, CRYSTALS-Dilithium, FALCON, SPHINCS+) is the inflection point.

Apex companies

Cybersecurity and Identity

Why it matters

Every layer of the critical-infrastructure stack — power grid, financial settlement, healthcare records, weapons platforms, government services — depends on cybersecurity products and the identity systems that authenticate access to them. Both are dominated by a small number of US and Israeli companies.

The chokepoint

Endpoint detection and response (EDR) is dominated by ~5 companies. Hardware security modules (HSMs) are dominated by ~3. The DNS root and the certificate authority system are similarly concentrated.

Apex companies