A holiday-season scramble exposes how “always on” offshore manufacturing ideals collide with real-world AXI limits.

A Yuletide surprise, courtesy of The Anthill. The same Anthill that wouldn’t answer emails, phone calls, texts or carrier pigeons the other 332 days of 2025. Things change, and snubs become embraces overnight when year-end revenue is threatened. Lucky us. Their AXI machine was down indefinitely; ours was definitely up. Meanwhile, an impossibly unrealistic, unreasonable, irrational name-brand tech superstar du jour was expecting results, no excuses, to fulfill a product launch.

Under Foundry 2.0, the semiconductor value chain is moving back into strategic focus.

When Joni Mitchell recorded Big Yellow Taxi, singing “You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone,” she was reiterating the proverbial warning that we often appreciate things properly only after losing them. It’s an observation that transcends context and can be applied even in today’s electronics industry. For decades, Western companies have outsourced significant parts of their value chain to achieve cost-down and to focus on core competencies in pursuit of efficiency. Today’s geopolitical tensions are drawing attention to the loss of sovereignty that results from exporting control of critical processes like packaging and testing as part of the semiconductor value chain.

As demand for AI and advanced electronics grows, the industry faces mounting pressure to reduce its reliance on scarce rare earth materials.

Much has been written and said in all areas of the world and in all walks of life about the challenges facing the world of technology. Whether it is developing and harnessing AI (artificial intelligence), utilizing electric vehicles, reducing pollution to leave a smaller carbon footprint, or training the next generation of employees to fill the multitude of jobs required to manufacture the advanced technologies that all the above will require, the number and magnitude of all these challenges is staggering. It is nothing, however, compared to the granddaddy of them all: creating the next generations of technology without depleting rare earth minerals.

The PCBAA is on a mission to ensure domestic security via a revitalized American manufacturing base.

Across the United States, a quiet but urgent realization has been taking shape – one that echoes through defense briefings, aerospace reviews, medical device evaluations and critical infrastructure planning sessions. The nation that once led the world in electronics manufacturing now faces a stark truth: the ability to design and manufacture advanced electronics on domestic soil has diminished to dangerous levels.