Walkabout — Oluwadi Analysis

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The US Government's Most Sensitive Chip Supply Chain Changed Hands in a Single Corporate Transaction in 2015. Nobody Voted on It.

The DoD doesn't buy chips for its most sensitive systems on the open market -- it relies on a small list of formally "Trusted" fabs, a list that changed hands in 2015 when IBM sold its chip business to GlobalFoundries in one transaction. RAMP-C (Intel) and $15.5B in CHIPS Act awards to Intel, Micron, and GlobalFoundries are the government's attempt to make sure that dependency never again rests on so few points of failure.

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Where this connects

Texas Instruments Got $1.6 Billion in Federal Chip Money, Finalized a Month Before Trump Took Office. Under Trump, It Announced $10 Billion More For the Same Plant — With No New Federal Money Attached.

Texas Instruments' $1.6 billion federal chip grant for its Sherman, Texas plant was finalized under the Biden administration a month befo...

In 1943, an Oscilloscope Spiked Every Time an Army Cipher Machine Encrypted a Letter. By 1951, the CIA Could Read the Plaintext From a Quarter Mile Away.

TEMPEST -- the NSA program addressing "compromising emanations," the electromagnetic leakage that lets a listener reconstruct what a devi...

A Single Meter on a Power Line Can Tell You What's Happening Inside a Building Without Anyone Seeing the Equipment. It Was Invented to Study Dishwashers.

Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring, developed at MIT in the early 1980s to study residential energy use, reads a building's aggregate electric...

The NSA's Actual Job Is Reading Signals, Not Running Spies. That's a Different Agency's Job — and Sixteen Others Each Have Their Own.

The US Intelligence Community isn't one agency doing "intelligence." It's eighteen legally separate organizations, each built around a sp...

The NSA Built Its Own Chip Factory in 1990 So It Wouldn't Have to Trust Outside Vendors. By 2004 It Trusted One. Today It Trusts Three.

Before any AI chip company had to choose between building its own fab, certifying one trusted outside vendor, or diversifying across seve...

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