We are headed for war in Europe for the third time in our history. There is no understanding, the tension is growing and it seems that Russia will try to assault Ukraine by force. This will once again change the geostrategic landscape of hardware where several manufacturers have already given their first impressions of how they will be affected. What hardware implications will the war between the NATO, Russia and Ukraine?
There are several points to consider in this military and human crisis: it will worsen the already existing chip crisis.
The war between Russia, Ukraine, NATO and hardware
It is the least important, without a doubt, given the panorama, but it is the issue that concerns us here and we are going to approach it in a different way. There is a word, a chemical element, a gas that can change everything and that we talked about just a few days ago: Neonwhich is produced and distributed by the Ukrainian Naftogaz.
ASML clears balls
In case we did not already know, Ukraine is the largest exporter of Neon in the world and this has half the industry in suspense, if not all of it, including ASML. The company uses this material for scanner lasers in their gas phase, so it is already moving to achieve alternative production in other countries.
As a fairly small amount is required compared to other industries in the sector, it does not seem that it will have problems maintaining the pace of production, which is key, on the other hand, for Samsung, Intel and TSMC to comply with their roadmap.
Micron will also diversify
As a good American company Micron has several suppliers of Neon for its NAND Flash. In this case, the war and the paralysis will directly influence him, but his CEO does not seem to be worried:
“It is true, we have a small part of our noble gases coming from Ukraine and of course we have a large inventory but more importantly we have multiple sources of supply. While we continue to monitor the situation carefully and certainly expect the situation to abate, we believe, based on current analysis, that our noble gas supply chain is in reasonable shape.”
Intel, TSMC and Samsung silent
The three main actors have not commented on this, but they also depend on Neon as a key gas in certain processes. It doesn’t seem like it’s going to affect them too much, especially having Japan, Taiwan or China as suppliers, it’s not a gas that they should worry about as it does about the rare earths who come from Russia.
At the moment, there is no evaluation of how the war will affect the production of chips for these materials, but demand will surely be diverted to China, which in turn controls part of the mines in Africa.
The logistics problem
Having seen all this, and as expected, we return to the initial problem of the crisis: logistics and supply times. Transferring production and increasing it to the countries mentioned is going to completely change the time of arrival and there will be delays, surely not immediately because there are reserves, but if “homework” has not been done, surely we can find delays in key categories like SSD, RAM, CPU and GPUbeing these main bastions.
