How and When the Chip Shortage Will End

As we use more AI to train and solve, increasingly important.

How and When the Chip Shortage Will End, in 4 Charts Fabs using older process nodes are the key SAMUEL K. MOORE

ONE LOOMING ARTIFACT of the pandemic that remains in 2023—the global chip shortage—has gratefully begun to recede. Unlike the state of things in mid-2021—when crimps in the semiconductor supply chain cropped up in big ways—supply and demand have become much less of a mismatch.

As IEEE Spectrum reported in the months since this story originally posted, the broken supply chains caused by the chip shortage have practically rewired whole segments of the tech industry. For the automotive industry, as we summarized in five charts that helped demystify the chip shortage, time eventually brought carmakers up from the end of a 52-week waiting list to get the chips they needed for their entertainment and driving-assistance systems. With chips finally reaching factory floors, their own manufacturing capacities were restored to prepandemic levels by the end of 2022.

Meanwhile, the mid-2022 passage of the CHIPS Act in the United States yielded a multibillion-dollar investment pool, some of which was dedicated to ramping up American manufacturing of the mature-generation chips upon which many industries—auto and otherwise—are so dependent. In March of 2023, the U.S. began disbursing CHIPS Act funding, while the E.U. considered getting into the chip-stimulus game as well .... '