A Volkswagen procurement video meeting in late March 2020. A polar vortex on Valentine's Day. A plating tool overheats in Naka. A container ship grounds in the Suez. By 2021, 169 downstream industries were affected. By the time the parking lot at the Kentucky Speedway filled with unfinished trucks, the system had less than five days of buffer left.
In April 2020 the auto industry cut chip orders by ~40%. The slots did not stay empty. Foundries reallocated them to laptops, monitors, gaming GPUs, webcams, and routers — products in record demand. By the time auto came back in Q4 2020, the slots were taken.
The Renesas fire affected five percent of one floor of one building. The Texas storm took three fabs offline for a few weeks. The Ever Given blocked a canal for less than a week. None would have been visible in the global trade statistics. The lesson was that they did not have to be.
A polar vortex pushes through the central US. Austin temps drop below 10°F. ERCOT instructs utilities to shed half of system demand. Samsung Austin, NXP Oak Hill, NXP East Austin, and Infineon all shut down. ~10% of US wafer production goes offline.
An overcurrent in a plating tool ignites the casing on the first floor of the N3 building in Hitachinaka. 600 m² of cleanroom burns. The line that produced 5–10% of the world's automotive MCUs cannot return to pre-fire shipping volume until summer.
The 400-meter container ship Ever Given grounds across both banks of the Suez Canal in a sandstorm. 367 vessels accumulate at the canal mouths. Several carry chips from Asian fabs to European auto-assembly lines.
Toyota — alone among major automakers — had stockpiled up to four months of certain critical chips since the 2011 Tohoku earthquake, against the orthodoxy of just-in-time it itself invented. The Delta variant spreads through SE Asia packaging plants. The buffer drains. Toyota cuts September global production by 40%.
A Department of Commerce survey published in January 2022 measured how much chip inventory the median US manufacturer was sitting on — before the shortage began, and at its peak. The system that ran the world's automotive, defense, consumer electronics, and household appliance industries had less buffer than the next weather event was likely to require.
AlixPartners kept revising its forecast of foregone industry sales upward through 2021. In May, $110 billion. By September, $210 billion. The forecast did not capture second-order effects. Used-car prices in the United States rose more than thirty-nine percent from March 2020 through late 2021, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, as buyers locked out of empty new-car lots bid up the constrained existing inventory.
By the autumn of 2021, used-vehicle prices were a meaningful contributor to the headline inflation number that would come to define the United States economy in the back half of the Biden administration's first year. The chip shortage had become macroeconomics.
Ford's Kentucky Truck Plant produced F-150 and Super Duty pickups without their final electronic modules and parked the unfinished trucks at the Kentucky Speedway. By the autumn, 60,000–70,000 incomplete trucks covered the racetrack's 30-acre infield in rows visible from low Earth orbit. Each was waiting for a single chip per vehicle.
Herbert Diess told the supervisory board the procurement team had been put on a war footing. Through 2021, Volkswagen began bypassing its tier-one suppliers — Bosch, Continental, Aptiv — and approaching foundries directly: NXP, Infineon, TSMC. The auto industry had not done that for forty years.
April 12, 2021 — three weeks after the Renesas fire. Biden holds up a 4-inch silicon wafer for the cameras with twenty CEOs assembled. CHIPS Act will follow on Aug 9, 2022, after Pat Gelsinger withholds Intel's Ohio groundbreaking ceremony as public protest. $52.7B for domestic semiconductor manufacturing and research.
The system had been engineered for efficiency at the expense of margin, in a sequence of rational corporate decisions that no individual chief executive would have made differently in the moment, and the result was a network in which one node hiccuping anywhere in the world could move trillions of dollars of downstream activity within weeks.
— Chapter 53 · Shortages & Supply Chains