Of course, I did not use the same title as the Chris Miller’s (c. 1988 – ) book, Chip War (2022). Why? Because this post was not going to be about his book, but a continuation of the previous post, where I admit that subject matter is developed from something. This time it is my own cantankerous understanding of how consumers have to interact with the manufacturers of integrated-circuits. Despite this, I spent the first half hour searching for Miller’s birth year and place of origin, without success. He completed his B.A. from Harvard in 2009, so I estimated at that time he would be about 21 years old. 2009 – 21 = 1988, with a c. placed in front of it to indicate that the date chosen was a wild guess. Yes, a more honest person would write it (wg 1988 – ). While I don’t often use it in my writings, I also like to know an author’s place of origin, because I feel those origins influence his/ her life. Personally, I am less interested in the name of the specific location, and more of its type: Is it wilderness, rural, exurban, suburban or densely populated urban environment? Was that area known for its wildlife, specific crops, industrial products or services?
Chip is slang, and can be confused with potato products. The polite term is integrated circuit, abbreviated to IC. Wikipedia tells us an IC is a compact assembly of electronic circuits formed from various electronic components — such as transistors, resistors, and capacitors — and their interconnections. These components are fabricated onto a thin, flat piece (“chip”) of semiconductor material, most commonly silicon. Integrated circuits are integral to a wide variety of electronic devices.
Metrics related to semi-conductor manufacturing include: number of facilities, revenue, profit, workforce and more. This allows a minimum of at least four different rankings. In the world, East Asian countries accounts for about 66% of manufacturing facilities at 292 sites. The region holds three-fourths of global chip production. Japan has 96 facilities producing a variety of products. Taiwan manufactures 60% of semiconductors in 79 facilities, accounting for 90% of the most advanced semiconductors. There are 16 South and 1 North Korean facilities, where only the south plays a dominant role in the memory chip market with more than 60% share. China has 77 facilities while India has 4. This means there are an additional 19 facilities elsewhere in East Asia, unless someone got the 292 site number wrong.
Xiaomi
Content on this weblog post will be suspended while I mention Xiaomi, the third-largest hand-held device = smartphone seller in the world as of 2025, immediately behind Apple and Samsung. No, the term manufacurer cannot be used, because much of the production is outsourced. We acquired two Xiaomi Pocophone F1 models in 2018-12, migrating from Huawai 9 Lite and 10 Lite.
Here is a quotation I sent to family members on 2018-12-30: I am feeling overwhelmed by digital technology at this moment in time. In the past two months I feel I have aged by five years. Currently there are a number of technological changes being undertaken that are demanding attention: 1) Repositioning media centre [Equivalent to a television] in living room; 2) Transition from Telenor/ ADSL to NTE/ Fiber for internet; 3) Transition from Telenor/ landline to ICE/ cell phone [No more landline!]; 4) Transition from Telenor/ SIM & Mycall/ SIM to ICE/ SIM [Cell phone service provider]; 5) Transition from Huawei/ P9 & Huawei/ P10 to Xiaomi/ Pocophone [HHDs or smartphones]; 6) Transition from Epson/ inkjet to Canon/ laser printer; 7) Transition from Asustor/ NAS to Alasdair/ NAS [servers]; 8) Transition from WD/ Red to Toshiba/ N300 [server hard drives]; 9) Transition from Asus laptop to Acer Chromebook [A temporary move that lasted one year]; 10) New CAT 6A cabling throughout the house; 11) New Ethernet (RJ-45) wall sockets throughout the house; 12) New equipment for Alasdair/ NAS [the server].
There are other things to be done, including the replacement of the Tinker Board as the media centre. At some point an Intel or AMD box will be found. However, this will not be happening during the next few months, as the entire computing budget for 2019 has been used up, before we even enter the year.
Some of these transitions feel minor, some feel less so.
What I can handle:
1) New downloaded materials…; 2) The transition to NTE/ Fiber actually went OK…; 3)De-comissioning of Telenor/ landline equipment; 4)Decommisioning landline equipment; 5) Installing SIM cards on the new phones; 6) Operating the Canon laser printer…;7) Physically installing Toshiba/ N300 hard drives onto the [server].
Every day, Xiaomi would ask permission to track us, and every day we refused. At one point in 2022, we decided we would not play their game any more, and bought a pair of Asus Zenfone 9 smartphones = hand-held devices (HHDs). After 4 years, we have not encountered a single request to track us. We expect the phones will last ten years.
Back to ICs
In the Americas, US has 78 IC production facilities. Facilities by state: Texas = 13; California = 12; Arizona = 9; Oregon = 9; These four states embrace more than half of semiconductor manufacturing in the United States. I attempted to find the number of facilities by state, but using one data set ended up with a total of 70 facilities. With a different data set, that increased the number of California facilities to 38, the total was 96. So rather than being specific there is consensus that the US shows a decreasing trend of chip manufacturing from 37% in 1990 to 12% in current times. Micron Technology is the largest manufacturer of ICs specializing in memory and data storage products, employing 12 300 people, headquartered in Boise, Idaho. Thus, Idaho ranks 6th with 4% of the American semi-conductor workforce.
In Europe, Germany has 20 facilities; Russia has 15; France has 4; Ireland and the Netherlands have 3 each; Austria and Czechia have 2 each; Belarus, Belgium, Hungary, Italy, Portugal and Spain have one each. That creates a total of 55 facilities.
It is now time to look at the anomaly of Israel, which is the only country with a semiconductor ecosystem in the Middle East. Note: Because the Baha’i Faith has its world headquarters in Haifa, Israel, I have visited it three times in 1979, 2005 and 2012. I will not be visiting it again. The IC industry is characterized by its relations with Asian, American and European companies, often involving joint projects. Israel has 4 facilities. Many years ago now, I read Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle (2009), written by two journalists, American Dan Senor (1971 – ) and Israeli Saul Singer (1965 – ). From reading this book, I learned: Israel has the highest concentration of startups in the world. Doubt, assertiveness and informality are the character traits of Israeli innovators. Even if a location is disadvantageous, it can be turned into an economic advantage.
At the Coop in Straumen, I usually check the produce labels, to ensure I am not bringing Israeli (brand name Jaffa) food home. I am also concerned about technology products. I specifically look for labels to show me where something is made: Made in Taiwan, most often indicates an acceptable product, although I am willing to buy products made in other places, especially in Europe and Asia, but not Israel.
Long term impact of boycotts. In 1984, Mary Manning (1963 – ), an Irish shopworker, refused to sell grapefruits from apartheid South Africa. This protest sparked a historic three year long strike that led to Ireland banning trade with South Africa. Since 2025, Manning is encouraging Ireland to stop trading with Israel.
In the late 1980s and onwards, Shell has been boycotted in Norway. Some say the boycott is because of Shell’s exploitation of South Africa. Please do not ask for the details because they are difficult to divine. In addition it is difficult to know how much the boycott related to the Brent Spar controversy.
Systematic racial segregation was adopted after South Africa’s 1948 general election, but had roots which extended back to the 17th century Dutch colonists in the country. In 1960, the Sharpeville massacre resulted in 69 black people being killed by the police. The victims were taking part in a demonstration against new pass laws which would greatly increase restrictions on black freedom of movement. There was a new massacre in 1976 following an uprising in Soweto. The Soweto uprising is regarded as a turning point in the fight against apartheid, both nationally and internationally. While more than 2 000 foreign companies were represented in South Africa, Royal Dutch/Shell, heavily involved in local mining, was perceived to be a suitable target for a boycott. In Norway, Storting (parliament) passed an Act imposing an economic boycott of South Africa in 1987.
Because of this presence, the group was among the enterprises which came in for heavy criticism. A number of organisations launched a campaign in the early 1970s against what they saw as Shell’s support for the apartheid regime. But the real explosion in the world’s media came in the mid-1980s, with an international consumer boycott of Royal Dutch/Shell launched in 1985.
Shell was also wanting to participate in the Norwegian offshore oil adventure. Brent Spar, was a North Sea oil storage and tanker loading buoy in the Brent oilfield, operated by Shell UK. It was constructed i 1976, installed in 1977, but by 1991 its economic life was over. Shell wanted to dispose of it, and the cheapest way of doing this was to sink it into the depths of the Atlantic. Early in 1995, Greenpeace became aware of this plan, and opposed it. At the end of 1995-04, Greenpeace activists occupied the Brent Spar rig in the North Sea while Shell ships attacked them with water canons. Towards the end of 1995-05, the activists were removed. In 1995-06, Shell withdrew their plan to sink Brent Spar. In early 1995-07, the Norwegian government gave Shell permission to mothball Brent Spar in Erfjorden, a remote location in the south-west of Norway. It remained there for several years while other options for disposal were considered.
By 1998, it was decided that Brent Spar would be disposed of on land and used as foundations for a new Norwegian ferry terminal. Later that year, The Convention for the Protection of the Marine Environment of the North-East Atlantic (OSPAR) member states announce agreement on onshore disposal of oil facilities in the future.
In mid-Norway, where we live, there was even more controversy. Shell wanted to build facilities to allow it to exploit Norwegian oil deposits. Three places competing for these facilities: Stjørdal (in North Trøndelag, furthest north, 80 km south of Cliff Cottage), Trondheim (in South Trøndelag, in the middle, about 110 km south of Cliff Cottage) and Kristiansund (in Møre og Romsdal, furthest south, about 300 km south of Cliff Cottage). In the end the facilities ended up in Kristiansund.
For Shell, the dispute leading to a boycott may have ended when Apartheid in South Africa officially ended 1994-05-10 with the country’s first multiracial democratic elections, which led to the inauguration of Nelson Mandela (1918 – 2013) as the nation’s first Black president. In terms of oil, the OSPAR agreement, essentially ended any controversy, makes the date 1998-07-23.
For many people living in Norway, including myself, the boycott never ended. Except when emergencies dictated the use of Shell fuel, I always avoided them. Much of the time we bought fuel for our vehicles at Filialen = the Branch, the local name for the Co-operative store, located about 6 km from Cliff Cottage. After 2008, I often bought fuel from Trønder Oil, a local company that had existed since 2001. In 2023, it changed its name to Driv Energi. While the term looks like drive, the usual Norwegian term for that activity is kjøre. Driv is closer to drift = to be carried slowly by a current of air or water, or to move aimlessly without a specific destination.
The Finnish energy company, St1, originally acquired most of Shell’s Finnish and Swedish fuel station businesses in 2010, and its 420 Norwegian fuel stations in 2015. However, they continued to use the Shell name, until 2025.
Supercomputers
One of the challenges with Miller’s writing, is that he is an enthusiastic American. This chauvanism is especially problematic when a Chinese supercomputer outranks everything else in the world, including USA. For the first time since 2017, a Chinese computer has topped a list sometimes viewed as a measure of a nation’s technological prowess. The LineShine computer in Shenzhen displaced top-ranked US computer El Capitan in the Top500 rankings released on Tuesday, 2026-06-22. It was LineShine’s debut on the list.
LineShine runs entirely on conventional computer chips (CPUs), instead of the graphics processors (GPUs). It uses about 42.2 megawatts of electricity to operate. LineShine operates at a speed of 2.198 exaflops = 2 quintillion calculations per second.
Meanwhile, in California, El Capitan, at the US government’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory now ranks second at 1.808 exaflops, This is followed by Frontier, at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, with a speed of 1.353 exaflops. In third place is Aurora at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, with 1.012 exaflops. In fifth place is the Jupiter supercomputer at the Jülich Supercomputing centre in Germany. It works at 1.000 exaflops. These five are the only publicly verified exascale computers in the world. Other countries with machines in the top 10 include Italy, Switzerland and Japan.
In 2025, the EU revealed a €20bn plan to build sites equipped with vast supercomputers to develop the next generation of AI models, as Europe attempts to overtake US and Chinese computers. The main challenge with supercomputers is their need for electrical power, followed by the vast amounts of water needed to cool them. Cooling is not a trivial issue. As I write this sentence, several places in Europe are reporting 45 C = 113 F temperatures. While the world has increased its temperature by 1.4 C (2.5 F) since pre-industrial times, Europe is at 2.4 C (4.3 F). It is currently 23 C = 73.4 F at Cliff Cottage, as this is being written.
Let us examine the Panda in the room: Chinese memory manufacturer ChangXin Memory Technologies = CXMT, has signed a long-term supply agreement with Tencent Holdings worth 20 billion yuan = US$2.94 billion. The agreement covers several years of DRAM chip supply for servers over somewhere between three and five years. This is ahead of CXMT’s stock market debut.
At the same time, Apple is feeling price increases for RAM. To pay for it, it has increased the up-rounded base price of its MacBook Neo, from US$ 600 to US$ 700 = NOK 9 000 in Norway. The Norwegian price includes 25% Value Added Tax (VAT). Other models experience even larger price increases. Apple is looking to reduce prices by seeking an exception from the Trump administration, allowing it to buy RAM chips from CXMT at discounted prices.
In April, I decided not to buy a pink MacBook Neo first edition, and wait for a replacement with 12 GB of RAM.
Water
Water is important for cooling of data centres, because the electricity used to process data heats up equipment. Water usage has to be planned. There are many different alternative uses to cooling data centres. It competes with water for irrigating lawns and crops, providing drinking water for both humans and livestock, providing washing water, production of cars, clothes or computers, to name three products beginning with c. It is not that any one use is particularly bad, but where water is used for one use, it is most often unavailable for other uses. Water that is used for one purpose typically ends up at a different place than that used for some other purpose. It is often argued that gray water can be used in toilets or for irrigating lawns, but that means that gray water has to be stored in separate facilities from the original colourless variant. That storage introduces a cost.
The chip war people are experiencing now involves random-access memory (RAM) prices. Consumers are experiencing price increases for desktop, laptop, mobile and server DRAM (with D meaning dynamic). Prices have surged since late 2024 and show no signs of abating in 2026. This price increase is attributed to an unprecedented memory demand for artificial intelligence (AI) servers. This follows a period of price declines in 2022–2023. The most significant factor is the explosion in AI server deployments. Training and running large AI models in data centers requires massive amounts of memory, both high-bandwidth memory (HBM) for accelerators and large pools of DDR4/DDR5 in servers. Major cloud giants, including Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and others, collectively spent about USD 400 billion on AI infrastructure in 2023, much of this is for DRAM.
Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron together control about 70% of the DRAM market. To focus on DDR5 and HBM, Samsung and Micron halted most DDR4 output in 2025, while SK Hynix reduced its DDR4 output share to 20%. This created a supply crunch for DDR4 in 2025, despite many customers relying on it. In fact, spot prices for DDR4 chips cost roughly the same as DDR5. Chinese DRAM maker CXMT flooded the market with cheap DDR4 in 2024, briefly causing an oversupply. then abruptly pivoted to DDR5, leaving a sudden void in DDR4 and resulting in a sharp price hike.
In early 2023, DRAM suppliers had 31 weeks of stock on hand. By late 2024, manufacturers slashed output and worked down those inventories. By Q4 2025, the average inventory of DRAM had fallen to 8 weeks. In other words, the excess stock has been largely absorbed, so buyers can no longer rely on warehouses of unsold chips to meet demand. Some device makers began over-ordering and strategically stockpiling memory in 2025, either to hedge against future shortages or to avoid potential tariffs announced by the US.
After a weak 2022–2023, global PC and server upgrade cycles are kicking in. New CPUs from Intel and AMD in 2024–25 have driven an industry shift to DDR5 memory for PCs and servers, increasing average memory capacity per device. Even smartphone sales were better than expected in 2023–24, which helped soak up mobile DRAM (LPDDR) supply. In short, while AI is the poster child, the broader electronics market is also no longer in a slump – so baseline demand for RAM has risen just as supply tightened.
All memory is in short supply, not just DDR4/DDR5 Modules. NAND flash (storage) and even hard drives are now difficult to obtain. As AI data centers consume hardware, they need fast storage (enterprise SSDs) and vast data capacity, leading to hard disk drive (HDD) shortages. For the first time in decades, all three major memory/storage categories – DRAM, NAND, and HDD – have been constrained simultaneously. This means PC makers and consumers feel pain on multiple fronts, with different technologies unable to become lower cost substitutes. Everything is becoming increasingly expensive at once.
In downturns, memory makers typically cut prices to move inventory, while in upturns they use their oligopoly power to make windfall profits. Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron have reportedly demanded 30% higher contract prices for DRAM (and NAND) from Q4 2025 from their customers. Samsung delayed finalizing its Q4 DRAM contract quotes by a few weeks, to gain a 25% price increase. open-market DDR prices in just one week as buyers panicked. Similarly, major memory module brands (ADATA, Crucial, Corsair, G.Skill, etc.) temporarily halted new orders in late 2025 because they were unable to obtain sufficient chips, and some retailers even suspended sales of RAM and SSDs to prevent stock shortages. All of this suggests that the supply side is effectively rationing output to the highest bidders. Memory producers are enjoying a profit windfall: SK Hynix, for example, just reported its highest-ever quarterly revenue in Q3 2025, crediting the “full-scale rise in prices of DRAM and NAND” and booming sales of high-performance AI memory. Even formerly low-margin commodity chips are now lucrative – Samsung’s operating profit margin on standard DRAM jumped to ~40% in Q3 2025 (versus 60% margin on its HBM chips).
In summary, the current RAM price spike is being driven by a mix of surging demand and deliberate supply constraints. Standard PC, mobile, and server memory – previously considered abundant – has become a highly sought-after commodity. Buyers from cloud giants to gadget makers are competing for scraps, sending prices through the roof. This leads to the question: how long can this last?
Industry experts and market researchers are now trying to gauge whether relief is in sight in the next year, or if the memory market will stay tight. Some analysts argue the current shortage cycle could last much longer than past booms, possibly for 3–4 years. This view is opposed by others.
Personal strategy
Consumers do not need to worry about world supply situations. They have to be concerned about themselves, probably other family members, possibly a few close friends. Most consumers do not have any influence over the prices they have to pay for components, either when they buy a configured computer, or assemble it themselves from components.
In 2025-10 we bought 2 new tower computers to replace 2 Asus PN mini desktop machines.
By 2026-03, these new machines had both failed, despite the replacement of their motherboard and CPU. Their RAM did not need replacement. We then took the PN mini machines in use again. Trish thought this was temporary, as she obtained a MacBook Neo in 2026-04-15. However, her bank does approve of her browser software, so I am relocating her PN mini machine to allow her to bank! About the same time, I started to use a 2023 Asus Zenbook laptop with Cachy Linux, as well an Asus PN-50 mini desktop machine with Linux Mint. I need two, because the Signal messaging system refuses to work on the PN-50 machine, but everything else worked better on it. I also have a third PC, an Asus AiO (all-in-one) machine with Linux Mint in the playshop.
On 2026-07-01, Signal on my laptop Violet failed, and I was advised to update all of the applications on the laptop. This I did. When I restarted the machine, the error message told me that it was entering an emergency mode. It didn’t, the computer was effectively dead. So now I use an Asus Zenfone for Signal.
At this point, it is appropriate to cite two computing laws: (Gordon) Moore’s (1929 – 2023) law from 1965, is the empirical observation that the number of transistors on a microchip doubles roughly every two years, while the cost of computers is halved. The corollary is (Niklaus)Wirth’s (1934 – 2024) law from 1995, in A Plea for Lean Software, an adage on computer performance which states that software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is becoming faster.
What does this mean? For most people this means that the Windows Operating System is sub-optimal, because it uses too many resources. Solutions: 1) The OS should be replaced with a Linux (or other open-source) distro, or 2) An old Windows based computer should be replaced with an Apple computer. There is not much one can do with Android or iOS when it comes to hand-held devices.
Currently, Trish is using an Apple MacBook Neo. It has 8 GB of RAM and 512 GB of Solid State storage. She has named her Lemon. I have accepted an offer of an Apple Mini Machine from 2014. It has 8 GB of RAM, and 1 TB of Hard disk space. I have named her Lily. Do I need a more advanced machine than this? I would like to think so, but to be truthful, probably not. At least 90% of my computer activities include: a) writing weblog posts; b) reading and writing messages as emails and Signals; c) reading news posts and watching videos.
People who currently use a Windows operating system (especially one that has expired or is about to expire), will probably find it economically beneficial to migrate to Linux. There are still many Windows users with XP and 7 variants. This is fine, as long as they are not used online. There are countless Linux distros, but the ones that are closest to Windows are Mint and Zorin. Because I began my Linux career with Mandrake, developed by Gaël Duval in 1997-8, as well as his current phone project /e/ started about 2018. I have a theoretical preference for its Mandrake’s successor, Mageia for computers and /e/ for hand-held devices. These use less resources (read in this case RAM) than those demanded by Windows. Younger people will have their own preferences. My young (42 yo) son prefers Cachy Linux, because programs get updated faster than with Mint. It is also better for gaming.
Apple can avoid the challenges facing Windows because it is responsible for both hardware and software in the same machine. Thus, both of these are optimized when products are released.