Uiteraard is er Neon op voorraad bij de chipmakers. Maar er zijn duidelijk zorgen volgens de automotive media.
Time and again, we’ve seen the fragility of distributed global supply chains. From floods making hard drive prices soar to a bike shortage worsened by Covid-shuttered factories, it seems that broad, international production only adds further points of failure to a process already made precarious by just-in-time inventory. Oh, yeah, cars have been hit once or twice, too. But, just as the global chip shortage was starting to ease, Russia invaded Ukraine — and now the two biggest suppliers of a crucial semiconductor component are fighting in the streets.
The actual production of semiconductors, or what’s known in the industry as teaching sand to think, involves a number of non-sand materials that don’t end up in the final product. One of those materials is possibly the most famous noble gas: Neon. When it isn’t being used for bisexual lighting, neon is needed to operate the industrial lasers used in semiconductor manufacturing. No neon means no chips, and 70 percent of the world’s neon comes from now-embattled Ukraine.