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Chapter 1: What role do semiconductors play in the AI revolution?
This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.
This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.
Vakuutusasioiden ei tarvitse olla hankalia. Meiltä saat helposti just sulle sopivan turvan ja tutkitusti alan parhaan palvelun. Aina hymyn verran paremmin. Valitse paras, valitse turva. Hymyile, olet turvassa.
The familiar sound of a computer booting up. You're probably near one right now. A phone in your hand, a laptop open in front of you. Switch it on and somewhere inside, a small piece of silicon starts doing sums, billions of them, every second. You've never seen it, but it's the reason the thing in front of you works.
And this is that sound scaled up, a room full of machines, rows of them running hot, kept alive by fans that never stop. I'm standing in one right now at the BBC and it's quite cool in here. This is the noise behind the AI boom, behind every answer from ChatGPT, every image, every model that runs on chips, tens of thousands of them.
I'm Sam Fenwick and this is Business Daily from the BBC World Service. The chip industry is one of the fastest growing on earth. This year it's heading for a trillion dollars in sales. So today we're following the money from the company that designs the chip to the factory that builds it to the one machine that makes it possible and the island the whole thing depends on.
This is the chip inside the AI boom. Who's getting rich off it and who's paying the bill? AI seems to be everywhere at the moment, from designing new medicines to forecasting the weather and driving autonomous cars. What it seems capable of is mind-blowing. You might think of it as software, something that lives on a screen, a chatbot, an app, an answer that appears out of nowhere.
But every one of those applications runs on a chip, a piece of silicon that you can hold in your hand. And the chip doing all the hard work started life running video games. Follow that chip and you follow the money behind AI. So let's start at the top of the chain with the company whose name you've probably heard of already.
Thank you.
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Chapter 2: How is NVIDIA shaping the chip design landscape?
And so the weaponization of a very advanced technology would cause a cascade of supply chain issues that we would all feel at the cash register, the grocery store, and beyond.
And all of it depends on one place, Taiwan. There's no second source, no backup island, an island that governs itself, but that China claims as its own. So here's the question that keeps the global economy awake at night. Chris Miller wrote the book on this. He's the author of Chip War. He teaches at Tufts University near Boston in the US. And I asked him how worried we should be.
If there were any disruption to the flow of chips out of Taiwan, and China could disrupt that at any moment, it would be devastating to the world's technology sector, but also to the world economy. Because today it's not just tech products like phones or data centers. The entire economy depends on access to chips that are to a substantial degree manufactured in Taiwan.
So that's cars and refrigerators and dishwashers and medical devices. They all require chips.
Last December, China ran a large-scale military exercise around Taiwan. They called it Justice Mission 2025. The People's Liberation Army, China's military, sent in its navy, its army, its air force and rocket force. and said the drills were to seize control of Taiwan's airspace and blockade its key ports.
It was at least the sixth major exercise around Taiwan since 2022, and analysts called the naval deployment the largest yet. In April, the top US commander in the Pacific told Congress that drills like this aren't just exercises, they're rehearsals. But what does that actually mean?
Well, I think Admiral Paparo is saying we need to take very seriously what China is showing us it can do. It's sailing its Navy. It's flying its air force around Taiwan as a threat to Taiwan and to the United States that it can cut off access to Taiwan whenever it pleases. And it's doing so to try to raise the temperature to intimidate the Taiwanese and the rest of the world.
Does that sound familiar? A waterway cut off? We've just lived through a squeeze on another one, the Strait of Hormuz, but Chris says the blockade of Taiwan would dwarf it.
It's similar except a tiny fraction of the impact of a disruption of trade around Taiwan. TSMC produces over 90% of the world's most advanced chips, including almost all of the chips that power artificial intelligence systems. It's vastly more important than Saudi Arabia is for oil or Qatar is for natural gas.
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