The region’s governments and corporations used offshored chip assembly facilities to learn about, and eventually domesticate, more advanced technologies. Washington’s foreign policy strategists embraced complex semiconductor supply chains as a tool to bind Asia to an American-led world. Capitalism’s inexorable demand for economic efficiency drove a constant push for cost cuts and corporate consolidation. The steady tempo of technological innovation that underwrote Moore’s Law required ever more complex materials, machinery, and processes that could only be supplied or funded via global
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