There is a new current running through the world, a circuit being completed. It begins deep in the earth, in the extraction of lithium, cobalt, and nickel, and ends in the silent hum of an autonomous vehicle or the disembodied voice of an AI assistant. This vertically integrated system, from mine to motor to computational model, is what some industry leaders have called the “electro-industrial stack.” The term is anodyne and technical, masking a shift in the organization of power, a reconfiguration of national destinies and the texture of daily life.
Software, we were told, would eat the world. And it did, in a sense. It devoured communication and media. But it left the heavy machinery of civilization largely untouched. The mine, the factory, the power grid, these remained analog, relics of a prior age. The electro-industrial stack is the return of the physical, the reassertion of atoms over bits. This system marries the digital brain to a metallic body, and in doing so, rewrites the rules of the game.
In a world of increasing instability, the ability to make your own things, from start to finish, is a form of power.
At the base of this stack lie the minerals, the stuff of the earth itself. The old empires were built on coal and iron; the new ones are being built on lithium, copper, and rare-earth elements. The geography of these resources is the new map of power. China, having understood this earlier than most nations, now dominates not just the extraction but the crucial midstream refining of these materials. It controls roughly 90% of the world’s supply of rare-earth magnets, the tiny, powerful hearts of the electric motors that power everything from electric vehicles to drones. It produces between 80% and 95% of the world’s gallium, a metal essential for the wide-bandgap semiconductors that function as the nervous system of the stack, conditioning and directing the flow of electricity.
This concentration of control creates choke points, vulnerabilities that echo the oil crises of the 20th century. In response, a new techno-nationalism has arisen. The United States and its allies speak of “friend-shoring,” of building domestic gigafactories, of securing their own supply chains in a defensive attempt to claw back control of the physical means of production. This is a matter of national security, a recognition that the future will be built with these materials, and to be dependent on another for them is to be subject to their will.
The second layer of the stack is the battery, the ability to store energy and distribute it over time. Before the advent of lithium-ion batteries, electricity was a fleeting thing, to be used the moment it was generated. Now, it can be captured and deployed at will. This capability has untethered energy from the grid, making it mobile, personal. Here again, the story of Chinese dominance is stark. Companies like CATL and BYD supply more than half of the world’s EV battery capacity. China hosts 78% of the world’s cell manufacturing capacity. It gained this position through a deliberate, long-term industrial strategy.
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Consider the case of BYD. The company began as a battery maker and now produces not only electric vehicles but also the semiconductors and electronic components that go into them. Its method is a case study in vertical integration, a modern-day echo of the Fordist ideal of controlling the entire production process, from raw material to finished product. This approach to production is a cultural paradigm, a way of seeing the world that prioritizes resilience and control over the supposed efficiencies of globalized supply chains. In a world of increasing instability, the ability to make your own things, from start to finish, is a form of power.
From batteries, the electricity flows through power electronics, the domain of materials like gallium nitride and silicon carbide. These are the unsung heroes of the stack, the switches and converters that manage the flow of energy with unprecedented efficiency. They allow for faster charging, longer range, and more powerful computations. And they are, of course, dependent on the Chinese-controlled supply of gallium.
Electricity, now conditioned and controlled, finds its purpose in the electric motor, translating electrical energy into motion. The permanent-magnet synchronous motors used in most EVs are miracles of efficiency, thanks to those rare-earth magnets. The dependence on China has spurred a search for alternatives, for motors that can achieve similar performance without the geopolitical baggage. It is a quiet arms race, fought in research labs and engineering departments, to design a future that is not so heavily mortgaged to a single supplier.
At the apex of the stack is compute. The processors and AI models that make sense of the world, that turn sensor data into driving decisions, that optimize the flow of power through a smart grid. Here, the concentration is just as pronounced, but the geography shifts. Nvidia, an American company, controls over 80% of the GPUs used for AI training. Most of the world’s advanced semiconductors are manufactured by TSMC in Taiwan. The combination of motive power from the lower layers of the stack with the decision-making power of the compute layer is where the digital and the material worlds finally merge.
The stack enables a world of smart appliances and autonomous drones, a world mediated by algorithms and speech interfaces. Its story is still being written, in the language of geopolitics, of materials science, and of the quiet, persistent hum of a new electrical age.
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