Post #849091

Welcome to a Multidimensional Economic Disaster "Perhaps the clearest examples are advanced memory and training chips, which are among the most important—and are by far the most expensive—components of training any AI model. Currently, most of them are produced by two companies in South Korea and one in Taiwan. These countries, in turn, get a large majority of their crude oil and much of their liquefied natural gas—which help fuel semiconductor manufacturing—from the Persian Gulf. The chip companies also require helium, sulfur, and bromine—three key inputs to silicon wafers—largely sourced from the region. [...] Because of the war in Iran, the Strait of Hormuz is functionally closed to most shipping vessels, stranding one-fifth of the world’s exports of natural gas, one-third of the world’s exports of crude oil, and significant quantities of the planet’s exportable fertilizer, helium, and sulfur. [...] The strait is “critical to basically every aspect of the global economy,” Sam Winter-Levy, a technology and national-security researcher at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told us. “The AI supply chain is not insulated.” https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/03/ai-boom-polycrisis/686559/?gift=nwn-guseqS6cY1kVeEKZAeB1EU9tGg8Uju7RCq6VZtk&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share