Hidden dependency · Silicon
Japan makes the things nobody can substitute
Japan's semiconductor materials chokepoint
#3Japan, Silicon control basis · grade B, Derived
Japan designs few leading-edge processors and fabricates little advanced logic. It ranks #3 on Silicon control anyway, because it sits underneath the layer everyone watches.
Shin-Etsu Chemical and SUMCO dominate silicon wafers. JSR and a handful of Japanese chemical firms dominate photoresist. Tokyo Electron holds decisive positions in deposition and coating, and Advantest in test. None of it is glamorous and all of it is hard to second-source: these are qualified, contaminant-sensitive inputs where changing supplier means requalifying an entire process flow.
The leverage was demonstrated, not theorised. In 2019 Japan restricted exports of three chemicals — fluorinated polyimide, photoresist and hydrogen fluoride — and threatened Korean memory output within weeks. The chokepoints that bite are rarely the ones with consumer brand names attached.
Source — SEMI, Fab capacity press releases (300mm and total) (2026)
Total installed capacity 2025: China 10.1m wafers per month, nearly a third of world capacity; Taiwan 5.8m; South Korea 5.4m. Separate 300mm-only regional shares for 2025: Korea 24%, Taiwan 21%, Japan 12%, Americas 9%, Europe and Middle East 7%, Southeast Asia 5%. IMPORTANT: these are all-node figures. China's share collapses at the leading edge, where it has almost no capacity, so this table flatters it badly — the single most misleading table in the atlas. SEMI's World Fab Forecast, which would fix the node split, is a paid product.
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The thinking behind the atlas is written up in Cheap thought has a physical address on Substack.