I know I might seem like a flat-earther with this, but I don't understand the chip crisis either. The explanation that many chipmakers went bankrupt after the automobile industry scaled down their orders seemed logical to me. But now that time has passed and we still have a chip crisis makes me think that there is something else.

We know that ASML doesn't ship high tech machines to China, it only ships low tech ones. China in return holds the world hostage by not producing enough chips. With enough subsidy, I think we could ramp up production to meet demand.

I also don't understand that the key companies are monopolys. It all seems a bit planned to me. Place the chip manufacturing company in Europe, chip factory in Taiwan, assemble in China. I feel like someone planned to distribute these technologies and infrastructure to avoid having one country having it all.

I know I cannot support my argument, but this is a gut feeling I have.

OTOH, nobody can reasonably explain why there are unsolveable real bottlenecks in the supply chain and why it would take years to resolve. Throw resources and people at it. This is not just one company with limited resources and a single goal. We should fund the semiconductor industry.

chips are critical for so many things, each "zone" of the world should have its own capabilities to build leading-edge chips, and probably with international collaboration on R&D (like ITER).

I don't think the global economy can "fund" properly more than the current number of actors of this industry, namely each of those zones would have to consider what would be its "local" leading-edge chip manufacturing as a "military defence"-thingy: making money out of it would be optional.

Yes, I agree, but the underlying IP is top secret. No one in the world can replicate it. I believe the leading forces want it to remain this way. (China shouldn't get its hand on high tech UEV machines because they might reverse engineer them, enforce export control laws etc.)