In-depth dossiers
Most records fit on a single card. A few nodes deserve an end-to-end investigation, because an entire swath of the industrial world rests on them. Each dossier: dated figures, primary sources, dependency chain, quantified disruption scenario, and a citable PDF export.
TSMC, Hsinchu
A single company, on a single island, etches nearly all the chips that train the world's artificial intelligence. The whole chain runs through it. Without the fabs of Hsinchu, Tainan and Kaohsiung, the iPhone, the training GPU and the precision missile cannot be built at the node they need, and no equivalent redundancy exists anywhere else on Earth.
Read the dossier → →ASML, Veldhoven
No leading-edge chip exists without a machine built by a single company in the world, in a single town in the Netherlands. Extreme ultraviolet lithography, the only way to etch patterns a few nanometers wide, is an absolute monopoly of ASML. And this monopoly conceals three others, deeper still: without Zeiss optics, the Cymer light source and the TRUMPF laser, ASML itself grinds to a halt.
→91 %Rare Earths · 6 figures · 5 sourcesChinese separation, Ganzhou & Baotou
China's dominance over rare earths is decided at separation, not at the mine. Chemically separating near-identical lanthanides from one another requires hundreds of stages of counter-current cascades, a know-how China spent half a century perfecting and that no one has replicated at scale. Diversifying mines is not enough: without separation capacity outside China, any new ore flows back to feed the monopoly.
→≈90 %Pharma & APIs · 6 figures · 5 sources6-APA & antibiotics, China
Nearly all penicillin-class antibiotics, amoxicillin foremost, derive from a single intermediate molecule, 6-APA, produced by fermentation. The West let this fermentation go: the last American plant closed in 2004. Today five Chinese firms concentrate most of it, and even India, the "pharmacy of the world," depends on it for nearly 96 %. In everyday medicine, the breaking point is the fermentation vat, not the pill.
→Map a critical dependency before it becomes a portfolio risk: real concentration, redundancies, quantified breaking points.
A sourced, dated dossier ready to cite, with the confidence level of every figure and the debunking of circulating myths.
A briefing exportable in seconds: the value chain, the timeline of shocks, the disruption scenario, the primary sources.
More dossiers are in preparation, energy, agriculture, medical isotopes. The observatory favours the depth of a flagship node over the accumulation of records.