FROM THE INDUSTRY
Napoleon once said that an army marches on its stomach. In the 21st century, that army marches on critical minerals—and the West is marching into a technological arms race without the supply train necessary to win. The world’s most powerful companies and governments are fixated on artificial intelligence, semiconductor supremacy and software-driven transformation. The rhetoric is about innovation, code and “the cloud”—a term that gives technology the illusion of intangible lightness. But the cloud is actually really heavy. Our digital civilisation, for all its talk of data and ideas, runs on copper, lithium, nickel, silicon, cobalt and rare earths—mined, refined and transported through a fragile global system dominated by China. Every act of innovation deepens our dependence on materials we no longer control.
Why the Blindness Persists Three psychological forces drive this: Abstraction bias: For decades, value creation has shifted from manufacturing to services, from atoms to bits. The higher up the economic pyramid you climb, the further you get from the mine and foundry. We start to believe the economy’s outputs can grow without proportional inputs. Moral outsourcing: Mineral extraction has been exported—geographically, economically and morally. The West demands clean energy and digital convenience but prefers not to see where materials come from or understand the mining that makes them possible, never mind the human suffering and moral ambiguity associated with it. Easier for that to be out of sight, out of mind. The illusion of infinite scalability: Software scales without friction; matter does not. The tech elite mistake the scalability of code for the scalability of raw materials and energy. They assume exponential growth can continue indefinitely—as though the earth’s crust will quietly oblige. Moore’s Law Is Dead For half a century, Moore’s Law shaped how engineers, investors and policymakers thought about progress. The assumption was that computing power would keep doubling every two years—smaller, faster, cheaper, forever. That belief became Silicon Valley’s catechism. But the curve has flattened. NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang declared in 2022 that “Moore’s Law is dead.” Intel’s CEO admitted transistor doubling now takes closer to ten years. Even TSMC warns each new node is reaching the limits of physics—costs are soaring, fabrication is hitting atomic barriers and scaling now depends more on packaging, cooling and energy than on silicon. The irony is profound: as computing becomes more advanced, it’s becoming more physical. The next chip is harder to make, hotter to run and vastly more expensive. Just as the next tonne of copper is deeper, lower-grade and costlier to mine. Both industries face the same law of diminishing returns. A leading-edge fab now costs over $20 billion to build. Copper ore grades have fallen by more than 30% in 20 years, doubling the energy required per tonne.
Supremacy chronicles the AI arms race but treats AI as weightless—as if the colossal hardware training GPT-4 appears by magic. The minerals powering those GPUs never make the story. Unit X comes closest, showing how defence innovation depends on commercial AI, yet the mineral base barely gets a mention. The final chapter is titled “From Steel to Silicon,” yet nowhere do they say where steel or silicon comes from.
Semiconductors are not the oil of the digital age. It’s copper.
The Missed Metaphor The most striking image in all four books comes from Unit X. At an Aspen Institute conference, Richard Danzig illustrated exponential technological growth through a parable: imagine Lake Michigan empty in 1940, with one ounce of water added and doubled annually. By 2020 there’s 40 feet of water; by 2025 the lake is full—1.3 quadrillion gallons. It’s a compelling metaphor about how technology compounds and suddenly floods everything. But what no one in that room considered is how much water it takes to fill a lake. If technology is the lake, then minerals are the water. One does not exist without the other. They saw infinite innovation; I see finite inputs. They saw the exponential curve of code; I see the exponential cost in copper, silicon, lithium and rare earths. It’s a case study in elite blindness—not because these thinkers are foolish, but because they’ve grown up in an economy so abstracted from physical production that they no longer perceive it. “It’s a case study in elite blindness – innovators are so abstracted from physical production that they no longer perceive it.”
The Gospel According to Silicon Valley
This year I read four defining books of the new technological era: Chip War by Chris Miller, The Technological Republic by Alex Karp and Nicholas Zamiska, Supremacy by Parmy Olson and Unit X by Raj Shah and Christopher Kirchhoff. Each tries to explain the race for technological power between democracies and autocracies. They are brilliant, urgent and insightful. But they all share the same blind spot: complete ignorance of the materials upon which every technology depends. They speak of semiconductors, AI and defence innovation as though they exist in a vacuum—as if the servers, satellites and electric grids that sustain them were conjured from thin air. The missing chapter in every book is the same: the physical base that underpins software supremacy. The Technological Republic warns of China’s weaponised supply chains but stops at manufacturing, not the inputs to manufacturing. Chip War rightly calls semiconductors “the oil of the digital age,” yet even that metaphor misses the deeper truth: oil came from wells the West controlled. The new supply chain begins in mines we do not. Over 90% of advanced chips are made in Taiwan and South Korea. Miller warns of chip supply chain fragility, yet the vulnerability runs deeper still: if the West cannot secure base materials, no number of fabs or subsidies will save it.
Volume 47 No.4 DECEMBER 2025
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