{"slug": "from-semicon-to-pax-silica-trusted-technology-is-moving-up-italys-agenda", "title": "From Semicon to Pax Silica, trusted technology is moving up Italy’s agenda", "summary": "At Semicon Taiwan, the artificial intelligence boom is reshaping the semiconductor supply chain, with investments in silicon photonics, advanced packaging, and other equipment, while TSMC's overseas expansion is pulling Taiwanese suppliers abroad. US Undersecretary of State Jacob Helberg linked semiconductor geography to national security, promoting 'Pax Silica' to build a network of trusted partners and avoid single points of failure.", "body_md": "**At Semicon Taiwan** this year, the artificial intelligence boom looked rather different from the story usually told through the numbers of the world’s leading chip designers and foundries.\n\n**AI moves down the supply chain.** The investment cycle unleashed by the race for computing power is travelling deeper into the semiconductor supply chain.\n\n- Silicon photonics and advanced packaging are among the most obvious beneficiaries, but the effects reach much further: testing, wet processing, CMP consumables, specialty gases, wafer grinding, thermal management and the infrastructure required to operate increasingly complex fabs.\n- For Taiwan’s equipment makers, this presents a second challenge. They need to expand capacity just as some of their biggest customers are moving overseas.\n\n**TSMC is pulling its ecosystem abroad.** TSMC’s manufacturing expansion in Arizona, Germany and other markets is beginning to pull parts of the industrial ecosystem that surrounds it in Taiwan along with it. Scientech, Group Up Industrial and Marketech International say capacity is already largely booked. Overseas investment and capacity planning are accelerating as suppliers position themselves for the next few years of fab construction.\n\n- The harder task will be replicating abroad at least some of what makes the Taiwanese model work. Installing machinery thousands of kilometres from Taiwan means having people on the ground to maintain it. Local manufacturing requires suppliers and partners. New fabs need service networks that, unlike the equipment itself, cannot simply be shipped across the Pacific.\n\n**Washington sees a security question.** Seen from Washington, this goes beyond an industrial reshuffle. **Jacob Helberg**, the US undersecretary of state, used a video address to the SEMICON Network Summit to draw a direct link between the geography of semiconductor manufacturing and US security.\n\n- “Semiconductors are the single most important technology of our lifetime,” Helberg said. They will shape who leads in artificial intelligence, how the defence capabilities of the future evolve and, ultimately, “who sets the terms of the global economy for the next generation”.\n- Taiwan, he noted, has been at the centre of the industry for decades. Its investments in the United States are now part of an effort to strengthen America’s manufacturing base.\n- Washington’s lesson can be distilled into one line: “concentration without resilience is a vulnerability”.\n\n**Taiwan’s strength is also the vulnerability.** The phrase captures one of the contradictions now confronting the semiconductor industry. Taiwan’s concentration of skills and capabilities is one of the reasons its ecosystem became so successful. That same concentration has become a risk Washington wants to mitigate.\n\n**America’s answer is Pax Silica.** Helberg, who describes himself as the initiative’s “architect”, has consistently presented it as a network of trusted partners bound by reliable supply, secure technology, fair trade and the rule of law.\n\n- The objective, reiterated in his message to Semicon, is to ensure that no “single point of failure” can hold the technological future hostage.\n\n**Governments set the perimeter. Companies build the network.** Another passage in his remarks offers a clue as to where that strategy will have to meet reality. Helberg’s appeal was directed as much at executives and investors as at governments.\n\n- “The deals you make will bring this network to life,” he said. Pax Silica, he added, can work only if it allows the private sector to lead, with trusted partners clearing the way.\n- Semicon already offers some indication of what that might look like.\n- Washington can draw the political boundaries of a technology network built on trust. Its industrial geography, however, will depend on companies: where they choose to invest, which partners they work with, and where they build the manufacturing capacity, maintenance operations and expertise required to support new fabs.\n\n**The industrial logic is already moving.** Taiwanese suppliers following TSMC to the United States or Europe are making those decisions on industrial and commercial grounds. There is no evidence in the material at hand to suggest otherwise.\n\n- But their expansion is taking place just as Washington seeks to make supply-chain resilience one of the organising principles of its technology relationships with partners.\n\n**Why this matters for Italy.** This is where the story reaches Italy: [Rome has already chosen to join Pax Silica](https://decode39.com/15971/italy-signs-the-pax-silica-declaration-rome-and-washington-together-on-ai-value-chain/), entering the US-led initiative to organise cooperation around trusted technologies and strategic supply chains.\n\n- Seen from the companies and exhibition halls of Semicon Taiwan, what might otherwise sound like another addition to the emerging vocabulary of transatlantic diplomacy takes on a much more tangible meaning.\n- For Italy, the question is what place it can secure once “trusted technology” begins to mean factories, suppliers, investment and industrial partnerships, as well as political declarations.\n- It is a question that will soon travel back across the Atlantic.\n\n**Rome and Washington are about to talk.** In three days, Italy’s undersecretary responsible for new technologies, [**Alessio Butti**, will be in the United State](https://decode39.com/16415/how-rome-and-washington-are-linking-industry-technological-competition-and-strategy/)s for a series of meetings that will touch more broadly on the relationship between allies, industry and trusted technologies.\n\n- Further initiatives between the Italian government and the US administration are also expected in the coming days around emerging technologies and strategic supply chains, with critical minerals and semiconductors among the areas in play.\n\n**The opportunity.** There is space for Rome to occupy, although its contours have yet to be defined. [Joining a US-led initiative](https://decode39.com/15937/italy-picks-a-side-on-ai-rome-joins-the-u-s-led-pax-silica/) establishes a political orientation, but also a strategic and operational one.\n\n- It does not determine where investment will flow, which companies will enter new supply chains or which countries will succeed in acquiring the industrial capabilities that come with them.\n\n**Taiwan makes that distinction particularly visible.** The AI boom is expanding the semiconductor economy just as TSMC’s overseas fabs begin to redistribute parts of the ecosystem that grew around the company. Washington wants this emerging geography to reinforce a network of economies it regards as trusted.\n\n**What we’re watching:**\n\n- The next phase will play out on the less diplomatic terrain of investment, suppliers and factories.\n- For Italy, that is where the weight of Pax Silica will really begin to be measured.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/from-semicon-to-pax-silica-trusted-technology-is-moving-up-italys-agenda", "canonical_source": "https://decode39.com/16442/from-semicon-to-pax-silica-trusted-technology-is-moving-up-italys-agenda/", "published_at": "2026-09-08 14:16:12+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-09-08 14:28:06.487689+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-infrastructure", "ai-chips", "ai-policy"], "entities": ["TSMC", "Scientech", "Group Up Industrial", "Marketech International", "Jacob Helberg", "SEMICON Network Summit", "Semicon Taiwan"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/from-semicon-to-pax-silica-trusted-technology-is-moving-up-italys-agenda", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/from-semicon-to-pax-silica-trusted-technology-is-moving-up-italys-agenda.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/from-semicon-to-pax-silica-trusted-technology-is-moving-up-italys-agenda.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/from-semicon-to-pax-silica-trusted-technology-is-moving-up-italys-agenda.jsonld"}}