How Microchips Are Made (And Why the World Is Fighting Over Them)

Your phone runs on sand. Melted, purified to 99.9999999%, sliced, and printed by a $250 million machine that fires lasers at tin. And now the most powerful people on Earth are fighting over it. In 2026 the world is expected to spend about $1.5 TRILLION on chips. One island makes over 90% of the most advanced ones. One company in the Netherlands builds the only machine that can print them. The US and China are in a chip war, tariffs are going up, and Elon Musk wants to build a chip factory so big the world's largest building would look like a garden shed. This is the story of how a grain of sand (meet Gary) became the most fought-over thing on the planet. ⏱️ Chapters 0:00 A rock that thinks 0:36 Chips are everywhere 1:25 What is a chip? 2:26 Meet Gary 3:14 The pricey popsicle 3:56 The machine that shoots tin 5:14 A thousand steps 6:33 Gary's world tour 7:24 Meet the players 8:32 One small basket 9:27 The chip war 10:24 The chatbot ate your RAM 11:09 Everybody wants in 12:29 The smartest rocks 13:15 Thanks for watching 📚 Sources 2026 chip sales forecast (WSTS): https://www.wsts.org/76/103/Global-Se... TSMC foundry share, Q2 2026 (TrendForce): https://www.trendforce.com/presscente... Taiwan and advanced chips (NPR): https://www.npr.org/2025/12/01/nx-s1-... ASML's $250M EUV machine (Reuters): https://finance.yahoo.com/news/explai... 25% tariff on certain advanced chips (White House): https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheet... US government stake in Intel (Intel): https://newsroom.intel.com/corporate/... Terafab (TechCrunch): https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/06/tes... Figures are as of October 2026 and change fast. Terafab's size is based on plans and filings, not a finished building. If you enjoyed this, subscribe and hit the bell. The next rock is coming. #semiconductors #chips #explained