In the 2006 film The Departed, Massachusetts State Police take down a mob boss who is smuggling U.S.-made microprocessors to China. Those microprocessors, one of the cops says, “are the kind of processors they put into computers to put a cruise missile up the ass of a camel from a couple hundred miles away.” These “little pieces of plastic,” he adds emphatically, “are about a hundred grand apiece.”
Fourteen years later, the competition between U.S. and Chinese microelectronics manufacturing is hotter than ever as the rivals pursue 5G technology, hypersonic weapons, and quantum computing. For U.S. lawmakers, rebuilding a domestic supply chain for critical materials—whether semiconductors or rare-earth elements—has become a central part of the economic and technological rivalry with China.
