Silicon Sovereignty: Industrial Policy and the Post-Neoliberal Turn

This article examines the structural collapse of neoliberal orthodoxy in the semiconductor industry, arguing that the global contest for chip manufacturing capacity has precipitated a decisive post-neoliberal turn in which state-led industrial policy, equity ownership, and strategic supply chain intervention have displaced market-primacy doctrine as the organising logic of technological power. Through analysis of the global semiconductor supply chain — encompassing U.S. chip designers (Nvidia, AMD, Qualcomm, Apple), Taiwanese and South Korean manufacturers (TSMC, Samsung), Dutch and Japanese equipment producers (ASML, Tokyo Electron), and Chinese national champions (SMIC) — the author demonstrates that advanced semiconductor manufacturing capacity has never been a market outcome but rather the product of decades of deliberate state investment, engineering education, and public-private coordination. The article treats the Trump administration's conversion of $11.1 billion in CHIPS Act funding into a 10% passive equity stake in Intel as a symbolic threshold event, marking the transition of the U.S. state from subsidiser to shareholder in a strategically vital industry, and situates this within a comparative framework encompassing European golden share traditions, Asian developmental state models, and the institutional shareholder concentration of BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street. The author concludes that durable industrial capacity requires decades-long commitment to research, education, and stable customer partnerships rather than transactional political intervention, and that the outcome of the current post-neoliberal experiment in state-led capitalism will determine the balance of technological and geopolitical power in the twenty-first century.

Part of a series of blog posts from the ERC funded project Democracy Challenged published on the project website https://democracychallenged.com/