🤖 Chip wars reach Latin America

Since the global semiconductor shortage triggered by the Covid-19 pandemic, the strategic importance of chip manufacturing has become impossible to ignore. In Brazil, the crunch even threatened to disrupt elections, as electronic voting machines depend on microchips, The Brazilian Report revealed in 2023.

Heads of state, policymakers, corporate executives and defense leaders scrambled to ensure that the next crisis would not catch them unprepared.

Their unease centered on Taiwan, home to the world’s most advanced semiconductor technology and the source of roughly half of all microchips. That dominance, however, has also become a vulnerability: any escalation of the island’s conflict with China could create a single point of failure for the global tech industry.

In Latin America, many viewed the crisis as…

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