How the world's most important companies actually depend on each other — the narrative companion to our interactive maps.
Make Sure I Know ItBMW builds the BMW, MINI, and Rolls-Royce brands from a global parts network spanning German engineering firms, Korean battery makers, and steel producers. Here's who supplies it.
Make Sure I Know ItApple designs the iPhone and its own chips, but building hundreds of millions of them a year takes a tight network of Asian assemblers, Korean and Taiwanese chipmakers, and a handful of Western materials suppliers. Here's who they are.
Make Sure I Know ItAWS increasingly runs on Amazon's own Trainium and Graviton chips instead of buying everything from NVIDIA. Here's who actually fabricates that silicon, and who's buying capacity on it.
Make Sure I Know ItHP designs its own PCs, printers, and conferencing hardware, but it doesn't build most of them. Here's who actually assembles HP devices, where the chips come from, and how the pieces fit together.
Make Sure I Know ItApplied Materials is the largest wafer-fabrication equipment maker on earth, selling deposition, etch, and CMP tools to every major chipmaker. Here's who buys those tools, and who supplies the parts inside them.
Make Sure I Know ItKLA doesn't make chips or the machines that build them. It makes the tools that find defects too small to see, and roughly every major fab in the world depends on it. Here's what KLA does and who it depends on.
Make Sure I Know ItEntegris doesn't make chips or fab equipment. It makes the filtration and specialty materials that keep chemistries pure enough for a modern fab to work at all. Here's what that means and who buys it.
Make Sure I Know ItEbara is a Japanese engineering firm best known for industrial pumps, but it's also the world's second-largest maker of the CMP systems and vacuum pumps chip fabs run on. Here's what it makes and who depends on it.
Make Sure I Know ItCoherent makes the lasers and optical transceivers connecting AI data centers, plus the sensing components inside iPhone Face ID. Here's who buys its photonics and what raw materials it depends on.
Make Sure I Know ItCirrus Logic makes the audio chips inside every iPhone, iPad, and Mac, and Apple accounts for roughly 91% of its sales. Here's what that dependency looks like from both sides.
Make Sure I Know ItBharat Electronics builds the radars, electronic warfare systems, and communications equipment used across India's armed forces. Here's who buys it, and which Indian suppliers feed its production lines.
Make Sure I Know ItBharat Dynamics builds the Akash and Astra missiles that arm India's military. Here's who buys them, and which Indian defense suppliers provide the propellants, alloys, and guidance electronics behind them.
Make Sure I Know ItAstera Labs doesn't make GPUs. It makes the connectivity chips that let hundreds of GPUs, CPUs, and memory modules talk to each other inside an AI server rack. Here's what that means and who's buying it.
Make Sure I Know ItAdvanced Energy Industries doesn't make chips or fab tools. It makes the precision power systems that strike and control the plasma inside etch and deposition chambers. Here's what that means and who depends on it.
Make Sure I Know ItCorning turns raw minerals into Gorilla Glass, display glass, and the optical fiber wiring AI data centers. Here's who its biggest customers are, and where the materials behind that glass actually come from.
Make Sure I Know ItEvery EUV lithography machine ASML sells contains optics that only one company on earth can build. Here's what Carl Zeiss SMT makes, why ASML partly owns it, and how deep the dependency runs.
Make Sure I Know ItBASF is the world's largest chemical company, and almost nothing it makes is a finished product a consumer buys directly. Here's who buys its chemicals, and what raw materials feed its plants.
Make Sure I Know ItAlbemarle mines and refines more lithium than anyone else on earth, feeding the batteries inside millions of EVs. Here's who buys its lithium hydroxide, where the ore comes from, and why one mine matters so much.
Make Sure I Know ItASML is the only company on earth that can build an EUV lithography machine — but it doesn't build one alone. Its most advanced systems run on optics from Carl Zeiss, lasers from TRUMPF, and parts from thousands of suppliers. Here's who supplies ASML, and why that makes it the single most concentrated chokepoint in tech.
Make Sure I Know ItWhen people think about a company, they think about the final product — the iPhone, the Tesla, the NVIDIA GPU. But behind every product is an invisible web of suppliers, materials, and equipment makers, and a single disruption in that web can stall an entire industry. Here's why supply chains are a strategic advantage, not a back-office function.
Make Sure I Know ItTSMC manufactures the world's most advanced chips, but it depends on a tiny group of equipment and materials suppliers to do it — from ASML's EUV machines to the silicon wafers and photoresists that feed every fab. Here's who supplies TSMC, and where the real chokepoints are.
Make Sure I Know ItLam Research sells the etch and deposition machines that make modern memory chips possible — so its customers are the world's biggest memory and logic manufacturers. Here's who buys from Lam Research, why memory makers dominate the list, and the concentration risk that comes with it.
Make Sure I Know ItCATL is the world's largest EV battery maker — but strip away one upstream supplier and its gigafactories go quiet. Here's the company CATL genuinely can't live without, why it can't simply switch, and the even deeper dependency hiding one layer below.
Make Sure I Know ItNVIDIA designs the world's most valuable AI chips but manufactures none of them. Here's who actually supplies NVIDIA — from TSMC's fabs to the materials and equipment makers behind every GPU.