Critical industries

There's a factory in Veldhoven, Netherlands, that most people have never heard of. It belongs to a company called ASML, and it makes machines that cost $380 million each, weigh 180 tons, and require three Boeing 747s to ship. These machines use extreme ultraviolet light — focused to a precision of 13.5 nanometers — to etch the circuits onto advanced semiconductors. ASML is the only company on Earth that makes them. Not the biggest. The only one. If ASML stopped shipping tomorrow, within two years the global supply of advanced chips would dry up. No new AI training runs. No new iPhones. No new F-35 fighter jets. No new servers for Amazon or Google or the NSA. One company. One country. Everything depends on it.

This is what a chokepoint looks like. And the modern world is full of them.

Why chokepoints matter more than armies

National security in the 21st century is less about how many tanks you have and more about which supply chains you control. The country that controls the bottleneck — the single-source technology without which modern systems cannot function — has leverage that no amount of military spending can substitute for. China figured this out. The United States is figuring it out. Most citizens haven't figured it out yet, and that's a problem, because the policies being made in your name — export controls, sanctions, industrial subsidies, defense budgets — are increasingly about these chokepoints, not about traditional military threats.

Here are the eleven sectors that actually determine who has power in the 21st century. Most of them never make the evening news. All of them matter more than the ones that do.

1. Semiconductor lithography and fabrication

ASML makes the machines. TSMC in Taiwan uses those machines to manufacture roughly 90% of the world's most advanced chips. Samsung and Intel make most of the rest. This is the foundation layer — without advanced chips, nothing else on this list works. When the U.S. passed the CHIPS Act in 2022 and committed $52 billion to domestic semiconductor manufacturing, it wasn't industrial policy. It was national security policy. The entire American technology stack depends on a single island 100 miles off the coast of China.

2. AI compute and foundation models

NVIDIA designs the GPUs that train every major AI model — its H100 and successor chips have a market share above 80% in AI training hardware. AMD and Google's TPUs are the only meaningful alternatives. On the model side, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and Meta are building systems that will automate cognitive labor the way the steam engine automated physical labor. The companies that control AI infrastructure today are building the economic foundation of the next fifty years. The compute required to train frontier models doubles roughly every six months. Whoever controls that compute controls the future.

3. Biotech and gene editing

CRISPR — the gene-editing technology that lets scientists rewrite DNA with unprecedented precision — was discovered in 2012. By 2023, the first CRISPR-based therapy was approved by the FDA: Casgevy, developed by CRISPR Therapeutics and Vertex Pharmaceuticals, which functionally cures sickle cell disease. Other companies — Editas Medicine, Intellia Therapeutics, Beam Therapeutics — are working on treatments for cancer, inherited blindness, and cardiovascular disease. This technology will reshape medicine, agriculture, and potentially the human species itself. The intellectual property, the manufacturing knowledge, and the regulatory expertise are concentrated in fewer than a dozen firms, mostly in the United States and Europe.

4. Advanced materials and nanotechnology

Applied Materials, Lam Research, and Tokyo Electron make the machines that make the machines. This is the meta-layer of manufacturing — the equipment that fabricates semiconductors, coats solar panels, and builds the physical infrastructure of the technology economy. Without these companies, you can't build a chip fab, a solar farm, or an advanced battery factory. It's the layer most people never think about, and it's one of the most concentrated.

5. Defense primes

Lockheed Martin ($65 billion in revenue), RTX/Raytheon ($69 billion), Northrop Grumman ($39 billion), General Dynamics ($42 billion), BAE Systems ($28 billion). Five companies build virtually every advanced weapons system, satellite, and cyber-warfare capability in the Western world. The F-35 program alone — the most expensive weapons system in history at over $1.7 trillion lifecycle cost — is Lockheed Martin. The Patriot missile defense system is RTX. The B-21 stealth bomber is Northrop Grumman. Virginia-class submarines are General Dynamics. These aren't just defense contractors. They're the industrial base without which the U.S. military doesn't function.

6. Space and launch

SpaceX launches more payload to orbit than every other company and country combined. That's not an exaggeration — in 2023, SpaceX conducted 98 orbital launches. The rest of the world combined did about 120. ULA (Boeing/Lockheed joint venture), Rocket Lab, and Blue Origin are the only other significant Western launch providers. Orbital access is the infrastructure of modern communications (Starlink has over 6,000 satellites), GPS navigation, military surveillance, and weather forecasting. One man — Elon Musk — has more control over global orbital access than any nation-state outside the U.S. and China. That fact should keep you up at night regardless of your politics.

7. Energy storage and the grid

CATL in China controls roughly 37% of the global EV battery market. BYD has another 16%. Together, two Chinese companies make more than half the batteries that power the global transition to electric vehicles. Panasonic and Samsung SDI are distant thirds. Tesla's energy division is growing fast but still small relative to the Chinese giants. The electrification of transportation, of the grid, of everything — it all depends on batteries, and the battery supply chain runs through China. That's not a market position. It's a strategic vulnerability.

8. Critical minerals

Lithium (for batteries): Albemarle, SQM, Tianqi Lithium. Rare earths (for magnets in EVs, wind turbines, and missiles): China controls roughly 60% of mining and 90% of processing. Cobalt (for battery cathodes): the Democratic Republic of Congo produces 70% of the world's supply, much of it under conditions that would be illegal in any developed country. These aren't optional inputs. Without lithium, no batteries. Without rare earths, no electric motors or precision-guided munitions. Without cobalt, no high-energy-density cathodes. The raw materials are as strategic as the finished products, and the supply chains are more concentrated and more fragile.

9. Cloud infrastructure and subsea cables

Three companies — Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud — control roughly 67% of the global cloud market. The physical internet itself runs through about 500 subsea fiber-optic cables, built and maintained primarily by SubCom (American) and NEC (Japanese). Nearly all of the world's internet traffic crosses an ocean at some point. If you severed the cables connecting the U.S. to Europe, the economic damage would be measured in billions of dollars per day. These cables are mapped, they're largely undefended, and they represent one of the most consequential single points of failure in the global economy.

10. Quantum computing and cryptography

IBM, Google Quantum AI, IonQ, and Rigetti are racing to build quantum computers powerful enough to break current encryption standards. When that happens — and most experts say "when," not "if," within 10-20 years — every encrypted communication, every secure database, every financial transaction will need to be re-secured with quantum-resistant cryptography. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) finalized its first post-quantum encryption standards in 2024. The transition to quantum-safe systems will be one of the largest infrastructure overhauls in computing history, and the window between "quantum computers can break current encryption" and "everyone has upgraded" is the most dangerous period. Whoever gets there first has the ability to read everyone else's secrets.

11. Cybersecurity

CrowdStrike, Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet, and the classified capabilities of the NSA, GCHQ, and their allied agencies. This is the defensive layer that protects everything else on this list. A successful cyberattack on TSMC's fabrication systems, on SpaceX's launch infrastructure, or on the subsea cable network would be more damaging than most conventional military strikes. Cybersecurity isn't a separate industry — it's the immune system of every other critical industry.

Explore the full Critical Industries Atlas for detailed per-sector data, apex company profiles, revenue figures, and chokepoint analysis.