A slow, evidence based map of the global chip industry: who the companies are, how big they are, and above all how they depend on each other. Built to unfold like an onion, one layer at a time.
The source infographic groups companies by the job they do (design, fabricate, package, sell). That is a value chain, not an ownership chart. No company here reports to another. The relationships are commercial: who licenses to whom, who fabricates for whom, who buys from whom. The point of this project is to fill in those edges with real evidence and then see where the true chokepoints are.
data/companies.csv one row per company (18 col shared schema), all 41 costed
data/relationships.csv one row per directed relationship (the crown jewel), 48 sourced edges
data/gaps.csv what no filing would say, and the documents read to establish it
data/sources.csv provenance registry
data/financials_timeseries.csv per company per period, for trends rather than a single snapshot
map.json this map's prose, storage key, and value chain layers
AGENT-RUNBOOK.md exact instructions the scheduled agent follows each run
PROGRESS.log append only log of what each burst did; newest entry wins
artifact/ the built page (generated by shared/build_map.py, never hand edited)
README.md this file
artifact/semiconductor-map.html renders the whole map from the
CSVs, self contained and offline.Status is written here in prose, which means it can rot. PROGRESS.log and the data are the truth; if
this list disagrees with them, they win.
| column | meaning |
|---|---|
| company | display name |
| ticker | primary stock symbol |
| exchange | where it trades |
| hq_country | headquarters country |
| roles | one or more of: fabless-chip, fabless-system, ip-eda, foundry, equipment, component-supplier, osat, idm, oem (semicolon separated) |
| primary_segment | short plain description of what it mainly sells |
| revenue_usd_b | annual revenue in billions USD |
| net_income_usd_b | annual net income in billions USD |
| market_cap_usd_b | market capitalization in billions USD |
| rd_spend_usd_b | annual research and development spend in billions USD |
| capex_usd_b | annual capital expenditure in billions USD |
| fiscal_year | the fiscal year the figures come from |
| filing_source | url or document the figures came from |
| last_updated | date the row was last filled (YYYY-MM-DD) |
| chokepoint | yes if the whole industry has few or no alternatives to this company |
| notes | free text |
| lens | accounting, politics or economics: which of the three lenses this row belongs to |
| source_tier | 1 to 3, how strong the evidence behind the figures is. 1 is a primary regulatory filing. This is the column “sourced or it does not exist” actually rests on |
| column | meaning |
|---|---|
| from_company | the company that acts |
| to_company | the company acted upon |
| relationship_type | licenses-ip-to, provides-eda-to, fabricates-for, supplies-components-to, sells-equipment-to, is-customer-of, packages-for, invests-in, competes-with |
| description | one plain sentence on the specific relationship |
| evidence_source | url or filing where this was found |
| evidence_date | date of that evidence |
| confidence | high, medium, or low |
| last_updated | date the row was written |
Direction matters. “TSMC fabricates-for Nvidia” and “Nvidia is-customer-of TSMC” are the same fact from two sides. Prefer recording the supplier side (fabricates-for, supplies-components-to, sells-equipment-to, licenses-ip-to) so the graph reads as flows of goods and value.
The eight companies the rest of the industry has the fewest alternatives to. All eight are now costed and every one carries sourced edges, which is the bar this map sets for a chokepoint claim. Edge counts as of 2026-07-22:
| # | company | edges | why it is a chokepoint |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Nvidia | 17 | dominant AI accelerator designer |
| 2 | TSMC | 10 | leading edge foundry the world leans on |
| 3 | Intel | 10 | IDM turning into a foundry |
| 4 | Arm | 8 | instruction set inside almost every phone |
| 5 | Samsung | 8 | spans foundry, memory, components and devices |
| 6 | Applied Materials | 5 | largest chip equipment maker |
| 7 | SK hynix | 5 | key supplier of HBM memory for AI |
| 8 | ASML | 4 | only maker of EUV lithography machines |
Counts come from relationships.csv and will drift as edges land. The claim that matters is not the
number but that none of these eight is flagged on assertion alone.