The word “chokepoint” was used to describe the Strait of Hormuz, the Suez Canal, and the oil fields of the Persian Gulf for many years. Each country built a navy around those passages. They fought a war over them. At some level, the whole structure of 20th-century foreign policy was based on the idea that “whoever controls the oil controls the room.”
That sense of logic is still there. A piece of silicon about the size of a thumbnail is now sharing space with it. It’s smaller, stranger, and in some ways much more dangerous.
“Chips are the new oil” is a phrase that is often used in policy circles. It does describe a real thing, but it also lets people off the hook too easily. Oil chokepoints are places on the ground. A tanker can be sent somewhere else. A pipeline can be built through different land. It takes time and money, but the choices are there. Silicon chokepoints are not the same. They’re technological and have been building up for thirty to forty years. You can’t change their route with just a map and a building contract.
Take a look at the supply chain in real life. About 70% of the global contract foundry market is controlled by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), which also makes more than 90% of the world’s most advanced chips. One business. One island. Then there’s ASML, a Dutch company that most people outside of the industry have never heard of. They make the only machines in the world that can print those chips using extreme ultraviolet lithography. It’s the only machine, not one of the best ones. It took ASML thirty years and about nine billion dollars to get to that point. No one else is close. China isn’t able to make one. The US can’t either, at least not yet.
When you add in the design software that is mostly made by American companies like NVIDIA and the rare-earth elements that are mostly refined in China, you have a single production chain that goes through four narrow gates. If any one of these gates is broken, it slows or stops the flow of chips to smartphones, data centers, military guidance systems, and hospital equipment all at the same time. The oil markets, which are made up of dozens of OPEC and non-OPEC producers, have never been this unstable before.
It looks like Washington knew this earlier than it let on in public. When export controls were tightened against China in September 2025 and again when the MATCH Act was passed in April 2026, it was a calculated bet that this concentration would last long enough to be used as leverage, and that blocking access to frontier chips would block something that couldn’t be bought anywhere else. Beijing’s response, which limited the export of rare earths, was strong enough to lead to emergency talks in Busan and a short-term ceasefire. But analysts are becoming more and more sure that rare-earth leverage can be undone, while chip dependence grows. China can put limits on the minerals. At this point, it can’t make the machines.
When you’re not in the main contest and watch this happen, there’s a quiet tension. Pakistan and most of the developing world are just watching a fight over technologies that they don’t fully control or make. But they will feel the effects in the form of supply problems, limited access to technologies, and the slow but steady breaking apart of the global supply chain that kept prices low for 30 years. Washington and Beijing aren’t making two separate and redundant semiconductor ecosystems to help anyone other than themselves. There will be costs for everyone, and it won’t just be the major powers who feel them the most.
It’s still not clear if this will lead to a controlled rivalry or something more dangerous. It’s clear that states that take chip dependence as seriously as they used to take energy security will be better prepared for what comes next. The microchip did not ask to be at the center of a political battle. It’s small, it’s necessary, and it quietly changes the rules of power in ways that crude oil has never been able to do in all its history.
