The Global Majority in the Chip: Extractive Supply Chains and Their Shared Vulnerability

In my research-based film trilogy Particular Waters (2023–26), I trace how the global semiconductor supply chain is entangled with water infrastructures. The films explore the resource consumption involved in chip manufacturing and its environmental consequences, approaching computing and AI infrastructure through the material flow of water and silicon. 

This work ventures along historical and material avenues to illuminate how the global semiconductor supply chain involves a massive mobilisation of natural resources, labour, and capital that creates fragmented but linked economic systems. I chart complex and interconnected extractive machines in which specialisation and interdependence coexist on a continent-crossing scale. 

The film trilogy centres around Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), the world’s largest advanced semiconductor foundry. TSMC controls 84 percent of the market for computer chips – chips that house the smallest and most efficient circuits. The trilogy begins at TSMC’s headquarters in Hsinchu, Taiwan; from there, it follows TSMC’s expanding onshore operations in Phoenix, US, and Dresden, Germany. 

As a Taiwanese multinational corporation with major clients including Nvidia, Apple, Qualcomm, and Advanced Micro Devices, Inc., TSMC plays a strategic role in the global semiconductor supply chain. Indeed, there is an emerging discussion of TSMC as a ‘silicon shield’ for the island nation. The logistical network of connections that enables the extraction and distribution of the earth’s resources for chip manufacturing is obscured for reasons of national security and economic benefit.

Expanding on the themes and research behind Particular Waters, I want to use this article as an occasion to interrogate how TSMC’s value chain reflects the economic and geopolitical reality of the Global Majority. By Global Majority, I refer to those who are ‘black, Asian, brown, dual-heritage, indigenous to the Global South’ and who represent approximately 80 percent of the world’s population.1 I will propose that the Global Majority has become a transnational condition rather than a static identity shaped by the logic of extraction: the continuous appropriation and exploitation of minerals, water, and fossil fuels. This logic amounts to planetary extractive machine that operates as a transnational system, rather than through a binary North–South relation. To read the Global Majority through the lens of extraction – through the faultlines running within the Global South, through the AI race splitting the world into US- and China-centred alliances – is to arrive, again and again, at a single island whose silicon shield holds all these tensions at once.

Taiwan resists easy classification within a Global North–South framework. By conventional economic measures, the country would be considered an advanced economy, with TSMC alone contributing 8.9 per cent to its gross domestic product (GDP). Yet Taiwan’s contested sovereignty, its exclusion from international organisations, places it in a position of vulnerability that is more typically associated with Global South countries. Thus, Taiwan is neither a straightforward beneficiary nor a victim of the extractive system of which it is a central node. The collective term ‘Global Majority’ suggests an alternative framework for understanding Taiwan’s position within the extractive global supply chain, posing the question of how the unequal relations of extraction to which the Global Majority is subject constitutes a shared condition, and whether this might be a starting point for a transnational politics of solidarity.

Taiwan’s relationship with developing countries varies widely, owing to Beijing’s economic exchanges with countries in support of the most extreme interpretations of its ‘One China Principle’.2 Still, Taiwan’s technology investments and economic cooperation harbour the most potential for improving the country’s relations with the Global Majority. According to Nvidia Corporation’s 2024 report on conflict minerals, TSMC manufactured its graphics processing units (GPUs) in Taiwan using tantalum and tungsten from a range of international sources including smelters and refiners in China, tin from Indonesia, and gold from Colombia. While Nvidia’s chips are made with a wide variety of minerals – such as gold, tantalum, palladium, boron, and tungsten – purified silicon and copper are key among them. In 2024, 14 out of 35 tantalum smelters and 19 out of 38 tungsten smelters and refiners were located in China.3 According to the US National Minerals Information Center’s report, that same year, combined tantalum extraction in Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nigeria, and Rwanda represented 80 percent of the global production of tantalum.4

Such data complicates any simplistic understanding of a unified Global Majority where Indonesia, Columbia, and various African nations extract, China refines, and Taiwan manufactures – each occupying a distinct, unequal position within the same extractive chain. Nonetheless, China has long held a dominant position within the global rare-earth value chain, extending beyond resource extraction to raw material processing.

Such dominance can be seen in a series of recent trade conflicts that saw Japan caught in the crosshairs of a wrathful China, with its near-monopoly of global chip-grade mineral processing. China’s ban on exports of dual-use technologies to Japan – including rare-earth elements, permanent magnets, and other critical minerals required for the production of defence technologies – is widely seen as a response to Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s comments in a November 2025 legislative session, when she stated that an attack on Taiwan would constitute an ‘existential threat’ to Japan and justify a military response.5

Punitive measures like these serve as China’s warning to countries that take explicit positions on cross-strait relations. The asymmetrical relations of extraction and the irreducible geopolitical differences complicate our possible understanding of a unified Global Majority. Global supply chains are political elements that reproduce oppression and social inequalities; they ‘proliferate difference within structures of economic power’; ‘grow gaps between rich and poor’; and ‘generate varied forms of hierarchy and exclusion’.6 Would naming these interconnected but unequal positions as the ‘Global Majority’ actually produce a new political relation, or merely describe their differentiated incorporation into the same extractive system? What would have to happen – even in nominal terms – to transform these transnational relations of extraction into solidarity, obligation, or collective political agency? 

In the trilogy’s third part, Sunshine-belt Machine (2026), I delve into the industrial history of silicon production in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Silicon, the earth’s second most abundant element, is an essential material in the manufacture of semiconductors and solar panels. From 1949 to 1990, the Western bloc countries imposed strict technology embargoes, forcing East Germany to source raw materials within the Eastern bloc and to rely on peeling apart and copying Western products to catch up with technological innovation. Where Taiwan’s position today is defined by its indispensability within a globally interdependent supply chain, East Germany’s was defined by enforced self-sufficiency – a closed circuit of extraction, invention, and improvisation sealed off from the West. East Germany’s self-sustaining economic model is of particular interest to me: a counter-image to the island nation that has since become a choke point in the world’s semiconductor supply chain. The founding of state-owned enterprise VEB Spurenmetalle Freiberg in 1957 was a milestone in the development of the GDR’s microelectronic industry, presenting a self-contained answer to isolation. At the same time, VEB’s establishment marked the town of Freiberg’s transition from a former mining and smelting community to a modern and innovative technology hub. According to archival material from the GDR’s Central Geological Institute that I located, several geological explorations for domestic quartzite deposits took place between the 1960s and the late ’70s. Following the traces of these investigations, my team and I filmed the surface of the Weisser Stein, a quartzite outcrop that was surveyed for mining.