August 09, 2026

China Presses a Weakness in America’s Tech Policy

By: David Feith

This article was originally published in The Wall Street Journal.

Washington has spent the past decade working to secure choke points of the semiconductor industry: fabrication plants, lithography equipment, advanced packaging, critical minerals and the handful of companies that dominate each. Now a new choke point has emerged in part of the industry that policymakers have barely considered: the instruction set architecture, or ISA.

America’s semiconductor strategy now must confront not only who controls the factories, tools, and materials required to make chips, but also who controls the language those chips speak.

ISAs are the language through which software tells a chip’s processor what to do, such as perform calculations, move data or execute commands in a program. For more than two decades, two ISAs have dominated mainstream computing: x86, which powers most personal computers and servers, and Arm, which dominates smartphones and is expanding into cars, defense systems and artificial intelligence. The two operate through different business models: x86 is used almost exclusively by Intel and AMD, while Arm historically has licensed its technology broadly to other chip designers.

Read the full article in The Wall Street Journal.

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