Comment by pacificmint | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pacificmint | Hacker News Reader

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It's not just the tech industry that is concentrated like that. I think more and more industries have these insane levels of concentration.

In 2016, an explosion at a single industrial gas facility caused a whipped cream shortage in the US. [1] I mean in the scheme of world problems, that's one we'll survive, but it does illustrate how vulnerable a lot of our supply chains are.

In 2007, the shutdown of the Canadian Chalk River reactor caused worldwide shortages of isotopes used for medical imaging, with real life consequences for patients. [2]

There are probably countless other examples. In the end, its the direct consequence of the constant quest to lower production costs and increase efficiencies.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/12/the-dead...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/06/business/worldbusiness/06...

Redundancy just isn’t rewarded by the market, yet another form of market failure.

I think more often than not it is... not sure where you would get that idea from.

Maybe the current article or similar situations where a single point of failure leads to huge delays, financial losses, bottlenecks or other issues for any nurter of companies that are reliant on this one point. It's a problem that's increasingly affecting many industries, where the amount of suppliers capable of providing certain parts is in the low single digits or even the source of a certain material can be traced to a single place. EUVL is a great example. If anything were to happen to ASML, 7nm would be dead in the water for a long time.

The increasing trends of the world to be dependent on a single source fo things... Must be something pushing the trend.

It depends on the likelihood of shortage. Some industries are better at this than others: automotive do multiple vendors for everything (most easily evident are tires: the same model could be supplied with tires from two or three different vendors).

About a decade ago I visited a European fab of one of the European semiconductor manufacturers, where they told me they are also manufacturing for an American semiconductor firm (which had its own network of fabs). The reason was insistence from auto companies to diversify the supply chain, getting the same processor from multiple fabs in different continents.

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