The US Needs to Get Back in the Business of Making Chips

American innovation, from smartphones to search engines to gene sequencing, is built on a foundation of impossibly intricate, perfectly etched silicon. But few of those semiconductors are actually made in the US. Only 12 percent of chips sold worldwide were made in the US in 2019, down from 37 percent in 1990. For decades, that wasn't seen as a problem. US companies were world leaders in designing cutting-edge chips, the most valuable and important part of the process.