The Biden Administration’s Executive Order 14017, issued in February 2021, came at a moment of acute concern over the resilience of the United States’ semiconductor supply chain. It was not just a reaction to the visible disruptions that dogged the auto sector, consumer electronics, and even defense contractors as the pandemic rippled through global manufacturing. The Executive Order reflected something deeper—a growing recognition that semiconductors had become, in effect, the backbone of national economic security, and that their supply chains had evolved into something too sprawling and opaque to be left unattended.
What followed was, by government standards, a rapid and unusually comprehensive review. By early 2022, agencies including the Department of Commerce and Department of Defense, alongside external partners, had compiled a sprawling picture of vulnerabilities. Much of the analysis was sobering. Heavy dependence on a few overseas wafer fabrication plants, fragile upstream sourcing of critical minerals, and thin domestic capacity in key stages of the value chain—the risks were laid bare in a way that left little room for comfortable platitudes.
Among the more technical (and frankly, less headline-grabbing) outputs of this exercise was an increasing focus on mapping the semiconductor supply chain not just at the assembly or design level, but upstream—particularly to the sources of wafer substrates and precursor materials. For foundries operating on US soil, this raised a complex but necessary question: where, precisely, are the raw materials coming from? And more importantly, what alternative sources might exist should geopolitical tensions or supply disruptions cut off existing routes?
For many of these foundries, the starting point has been the open data sets provided by agencies like the US Geological Survey (USGS) and, to a more targeted extent, the Department of Defense (DoD). The USGS maintains detailed, if sometimes dated, datasets on the locations and production levels of critical minerals essential to semiconductor manufacturing. Materials such as silicon, gallium, germanium, and rare earth elements feature prominently. The DoD’s datasets, where accessible, provide overlays on supplier reliability, national security considerations, and in some cases proprietary risk assessments related to specific suppliers or regions.
It’s fair to say that no single data set tells the full story. Companies have had to learn to work across sources, matching production and export data with their own procurement records, and filling gaps where government data leaves off. There is a certain irony in this—while the Executive Order’s intent was to improve transparency, the process of achieving that transparency has required navigating a thicket of data that was, in many respects, never designed to be pieced together in this way.
Some foundries, particularly those with substantial in-house analytics capacity, have begun developing internal dashboards or mapping tools to make sense of these data layers. These dashboards typically plot supplier sites geographically, overlay mineral source data, and attempt to model exposure to various risks—be they natural disasters, trade policy shifts, or political instability. The better examples integrate live feeds, drawing on updates from customs data, price indices, and shipping logs to monitor supply-chain health in something approaching real time.
But most firms, even large ones, are not building these tools from scratch. Instead, they’re adapting templates and frameworks suggested by industry groups or semi-public consortia working alongside the government. A national semiconductor supply-chain resilience dashboard, in fact, has emerged as one of the more concrete goals of the EO 14017 follow-on initiatives. The idea is to provide a shared platform that foundries, policymakers, and other stakeholders can use to visualize the chain holistically—not just individual company segments, but the national profile as a whole.
Designing such a dashboard is no small feat. At minimum, it requires layers showing wafer substrate origin points, fab locations, assembly and test sites, and downstream integration nodes. On top of that, resilience indicators—redundancy levels, inventory buffers, supplier diversity, geopolitical exposure—must be integrated in a way that is intuitive yet sufficiently nuanced. There is an inherent tension here: make the tool too complex, and it risks becoming unwieldy; too simple, and it risks oversimplifying realities that are anything but.
A functional template for such a dashboard typically starts with core layers of geographic and production data—sourced, again, from USGS, DoD, and industry publications. Foundries are encouraged to map these against their procurement logs, identifying both direct suppliers and key Tier 2 or Tier 3 entities. From there, exposure metrics can be built out: percentage reliance on a single source for critical inputs, lead times under normal and stress conditions, and alternate sourcing scenarios. Risk weightings can be drawn from public domain political risk indices or proprietary models.
Interestingly, some foundries report that the exercise of building these dashboards, even in preliminary form, has surfaced vulnerabilities that weren’t obvious before. A supplier that looked secure on paper turns out to draw all of its inputs from a single region, or a shipping route that was assumed stable reveals itself as fragile under even minor disruption scenarios. These insights, while at times uncomfortable, have proved invaluable for scenario planning.
Whether the national-level dashboard ultimately materializes in the form originally envisioned is, at this point, still uncertain. The challenges of data sharing, commercial confidentiality, and inter-agency coordination are non-trivial. But what seems clear is that the process of trying to build it has already pushed the industry toward a more rigorous and data-driven approach to supply-chain resilience. In that sense, the Executive Order’s objectives may already be shaping outcomes, even as the tools to implement them are still being assembled.