US Launches Pax Silica to Secure Silicon Supply Chain
From 12 to 13 December 2025, the US hosted the Pax Silica Summit in Washington, DC. The Conference culminated in the signing of the Pax Silica Pact with US, UAE, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Israel, and the Netherlands as founding members.
The Factsheet from the US Department of State emphasizes that the Pax Silica is a strategic initiative to build a secure, prosperous, and innovation-driven silicon supply chain, including #CriticalMinerals, energy inputs, semiconductor manufacturing, #AI infrastructure, and related logistics
“The initiative aims to build a secure, resilient and innovative technological ecosystem across the entire value chain — from the extraction of critical minerals and energy, through advanced manufacturing and semiconductors, to AI infrastructure, data centers and logistics.”
The Summit also had representatives from Taiwan, Canada, EU and the OECD. The countries have the most important companies and investors powering the global silicon supply chain. Examples of companies include Sony, Hitachi, Fujitsu, Samsung, SK Hynix, Temesak, Deepmind, MGX, Rio Tinto, and ASML.
TSMC, the world’s largest semiconductor fab located in Taiwan, was the elephant in the room. President Trump has been pushing TSMC to relocate its production to the US. India was also disappointed to not be included, as it strives to attract technical and financial support to build up its own semiconductor capabilities.
Based on the shared view that AI represents the new transformative technology for long-term prosperity, the #PaxSilica is in response to the following:
- Growing demand from partners to deepen technological and economic cooperation with the US
- Mitigating risks from coercive dependencies
- Coordination of policies to protect sensitive technologies and critical infrastructure
President Trump has reiterated on several occasions that economic leadership is central to the national security of the US, and he is determined to do whatever it takes for the US to win the AI race.
In a related development, President Trump authorized Nvidia to sell its H200 GPU to China. The H200 is currently one generation behind its top chip from the Blackwell series. Despite the export controls, it was found that China was able to acquire Nvidia chips via third-party companies. It has been reported that Alibaba and ByteDance (TikTok’s parent company) are interested in ordering high-end #AI chips from the US, but the official stance of the Chinese government is to prioritize local sources.
US State Undersecretary Jacob Helberg will lead the effort to coordinate with partners to operationalize the Summit’s discussions through the identification of relevant projects. In addition to the Pax Silica, it is rumored that President Trump is mulling the establishment of a new grouping — called the Core Five (C5) — that would better reflect the new world order, consisting of US, China, Russia, India and Japan.