Not even the United States can make an AI chip on its own.
The Index Score measures what a country can do on its own. This page measures the opposite: what everyone else cannot do without it.
How one AI chip gets made
Building one AI chip takes six steps. Each step is controlled by a single country, and there is no second supplier to turn to. Seven countries hold all six between them. Eighteen of the twenty-five countries in the Index hold nothing.
A step only counts here if two things are true: the companies that make it are all in one country, and that country’s government could stop the exports if it chose to. One without the other is not enough. A company with no competitors is not the same as a country with power over everyone else — which is why ASML counts for the Netherlands and Arm does not count for the United Kingdom.
Open any step to see who makes it, why it cannot be replaced, and where the claim comes from.
American law reaches into other countries’ steps
Washington can block a machine built anywhere in the world if American parts or software went into it. That covers Dutch and Japanese equipment, so it reaches steps the United States does not own.
Why it cannot be replacedUS law that applies outside the US
The Foreign Direct Product rule lets Washington restrict foreign-made goods if they were built using American technology. Because ASML machines and Japanese tooling both contain American parts and software, this reaches into chokepoints the United States does not own. In 2023 both the Netherlands and Japan brought in their own export controls that lined up with American ones. This is the strongest entry on the list: it is a law rather than an industry, and it sits on top of everyone else's position.
US Bureau of Industry and Security →Swipe through the six steps →
EUV optics
Never blocked exportsWhy it cannot be replacedThe only supplier to the only supplier
ZEISS SMT makes the mirrors and optical columns inside every ASML machine. ASML states in its own annual report that without them it would effectively cease to be able to conduct its business, and that its output is capped by ZEISS capacity. Oberkochen and Wetzlar are the only two places on earth the columns are built. There is a German chokepoint inside the Dutch one. Berlin has never used it: it declined to join the 2023 export controls, and because transfers inside the EU need no licence, it could not block shipments to ASML even if it wanted to.
ASML Annual Report 2025 →EUV lithography
Has blocked exportsWhy it cannot be replacedThe only supplier in the world
ASML is the only company that makes extreme ultraviolet lithography machines. No leading-edge chip can be made anywhere without them, so Dutch export licensing decides who is allowed to build advanced silicon at all. The Netherlands introduced its own controls in September 2023 and has withheld licences since.
ASML →Resist and coating
Has blocked exportsResist coating and developingOne firm holds all of it
Tokyo Electron holds about 92% of coater and developer track systems worldwide, and all of the EUV track. Japan put exactly this tool class under licence in July 2023 — the ordinance controls equipment that coats, heats or develops resist using extreme ultraviolet radiation. The one alternative, Lam's dry resist, has a single announced customer after five years.
CSIS translation of METI Ordinance No. 25 →Photoresists and specialty chemicalsA handful of firms, all Japanese
Japanese suppliers dominate the chemicals that lithography depends on. Tokyo restricted three of them against South Korea in 2019 — fluorinated polyimide, photoresist and hydrogen fluoride — which is what proved the chokepoint was real.
Japan METI →Logic and packaging
Never blocked exportsWhy it cannot be replacedOne dominant maker, rivals years behind
TSMC holds over 90% of production at the 3nm and 2nm nodes, and roughly two thirds of CoWoS advanced packaging. Every advanced AI chip, whoever designed it, is made on the island. Packaging is the weaker half — Amkor, ASE and Intel hold the rest and are growing, and capacity is moving to Arizona — but it has been the binding constraint on accelerator supply more than once. Taipei lists both as national core key technologies; it has never restricted either.
TSMC →Bandwidth memory
Never blocked exportsWhy it cannot be replacedThree suppliers, two Korean
Samsung and SK Hynix held roughly four fifths of high-bandwidth memory output in 2026, down from almost all of it in 2024. The gap went to Micron, whose supply chain touches Korea nowhere — memory from Taiwan and Japan, packaging in Taiwan and, from 2027, Singapore. An accelerator without this memory is not an accelerator, and shortages have already cut Nvidia's 2026 shipment forecasts. This is the weakest entry here and it is getting weaker: Seoul designates the stacking technology as strategic but exempts the finished chips from export control, so every restriction ever applied to Korean memory has been an American one.
TrendForce →Design and tools
Has blocked exportsChip design softwareTwo firms, most of the market
Almost no advanced chip is designed without American electronic design automation tools. Withdrawing them stops a design programme before any silicon exists, and Washington has done exactly that.
US Bureau of Industry and Security →Accelerator designOne dominant designer
Nvidia designs the overwhelming majority of AI accelerators, and Washington has repeatedly restricted which nations may buy them. The design sits in California even when the manufacturing does not.
US Bureau of Industry and Security →Chinese materials sit under the whole chain
The metals that go into the magnets, the machines and the chips themselves are processed mostly in one country, and Beijing already requires a licence to export them.
Rare earth separation and processingMost of the processing in the world
China processes the large majority of separated rare earths, the inputs for the magnets in manufacturing equipment, robotics, drones and defence hardware. Beijing has already restricted their export, which converted a commercial position into an instrument of state.
US Geological Survey →Gallium and germaniumThe biggest producer, exports already restricted
Both are needed for advanced semiconductors and optoelectronics, and both went under Chinese export licensing in 2023. A second chokepoint, and one Beijing has already shown it is willing to close.
US Geological Survey →Why none of this changes a score
None of this moves any country’s Score. The Index measures what a country can build, run and control on its own. A chokepoint is the other way round — what everyone else needs from it — and the two do not add together. The Netherlands has middling access to chips and total control of the machines that make them. Those are different things, and sometimes opposite ones.
There is no chokepoint score and no chokepoint ranking. To build one honestly you would need to know how critical each step is and how many years it would take to replace, country by country. That data does not exist. Working it out from the twelve measurements instead gives nonsense: on one reading Indonesia comes eighth and Taiwan nineteenth.
Even counting them is misleading, which is why this is drawn as a chain rather than a tally. An audit in July 2026 removed three entries that did not hold up. Japanese silicon wafers: two firms hold about 53% between them, which is a majority rather than control, and Japan left wafers out of both its 2019 measures against South Korea and its 2023 export controls. Japanese etching and deposition machines: Applied Materials and Lam Research are just as strong. Australian rare earths: 7.4% of world mining, the separation happens in Malaysia, and Canberra has chosen to be a reliable supplier rather than to restrict anything. Taiwanese packaging was folded into the fabrication entry — same company, same government, and if one fails so does the other.
All eleven have now been checked. The last was South Korean memory, and it changed the entry: the page had said "two suppliers, both Korean", which stopped being true in 2025. Micron now takes roughly a fifth of the market on a supply chain that touches Korea nowhere. Korea keeps the entry — four fifths is well above the 53% that removed Japanese wafers — but it is the weakest one here and the share is falling.