JA Solar Holdings
A solar cell supplier that grew on Chinese subsidies — and now faces U.S. sanctions for military links.
Semiconductors
Sand, refined into the bottleneck of the world economy.
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All briefs
LONGi
LONGi didn’t win the solar race by selling panels — it won by owning the wafer.
First Solar
Harold McMaster · 1999
First Solar is a U.S. solar panel manufacturer that builds cadmium telluride (CdTe) thin-film modules in domestic factories. It was founded in 1990 as Solar Cells, Inc. by Harold McMaster, acquired and rebranded in 1999, and went public in 2006. Its technology diverges from mainstream silicon PV. As of March 2026, it had ~14 GW of annual domestic nameplate capacity across facilities in Ohio, Alabama, and Louisiana. It does not produce silicon panels, does not operate overseas factories, and does not integrate storage or software.
Morris Chang
He didn’t bet on Asia — he measured yield in Texas and Japan, then moved the factory.
Akio Morita
Sony didn’t win by inventing more — it won by licensing smarter, branding bolder, and controlling software before anyone else thought to ask.
AMD
Jerry Sanders · 1969
AMD is not a story of disruption — it is a story of licensed dependence, contested access, and court-mandated self-reliance in semiconductor design.
BYD Company
Wang Chuanfu · 1995
BYD is a battery-born, vertically integrated Chinese manufacturing conglomerate whose automotive business now dominates its revenue and global EV output — but the sources disclose no financials, no unit economics, and no evidence of why its integration delivers advantage beyond scale and employment headcount.
Jensen Huang
Jensen Huang didn’t build an AI company — he built a monopoly on the physics of computation.
Masayoshi Son
Masayoshi Son didn’t build AI — he built a vehicle to bet on whoever claims they will.
Mitsubishi Electric
A century-old industrial manufacturer betting 100 billion yen on semiconductors — while still reeling from a Chinese cyberattack.
SoftBank Group
Masayoshi Son · 1981
SoftBank Group is a Japanese investment holding company founded in 1981 as a software distributor, restructured as a holding company in 1999, and renamed SoftBank Group Corp in 2015. It focuses exclusively on investment management — primarily in technology companies across diverse markets. Its Vision Fund, launched in 2017 with $100 billion, was the world’s largest technology-focused venture capital fund at inception. SoftBank went public in 1994 with a $3 billion valuation. In 2016, it announced a $50 billion U.S. investment commitment targeting 50,000 jobs. From 2023, it shifted strategy toward AI infrastructure and semiconductor-related investments — a direction confirmed by Masayoshi Son’s January 2025 chairmanship of Stargate LLC.
Intel
Robert Noyce & Gordon Moore · 1968
Intel is a foundational semiconductor company whose business model pivoted from memory to microprocessors—and whose lasting leverage came from controlling the x86 instruction set, not just fabrication.
TSMC
Morris Chang · 1987
TSMC is the world’s largest and most advanced contract chipmaker — a state-enabled, capital-intensive factory system that executes Moore’s Law with industrial rigour. Its dominance comes not from vision or branding, but from delivering real chips, on schedule, at scale.
Lisa Su
Lisa Su’s authority comes from solving physics problems on the wafer — not from vision statements or funding rounds.
Nvidia
Jensen Huang · 1993
Nvidia is a fabless semiconductor company whose business model depends on external demand shocks, not internal cost control or manufacturing leverage.