^{Democracy & Technology Blog} The Microchip Era Is About to End

The following excerpt is from a George Gilder article in The Wall Street Journal November 4, 2025. The themes he writes about will be presented at COSM, our annual technology conference. Join us November 19-21 in Scottsdale, Arizona. The price of registration will increase this Friday, November 7.

We are in the microchip era, which promises an industrial revolution that will bring artificial intelligence to almost all human activity.

The exemplar of this era is Nvidia Corp. Its market capitalization of around $5 trillion makes it the world’s most valuable company. Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s founder and CEO, dazzled the audience at the company’s AI conference in Washington last week. In his keynote address, Mr. Huang detailed the advances Nvidia’s chips have wrought. He thanked President Trump for bringing chip fabrication back to the U.S. from Asia with energy policies that enable domestic AI microchip production.

Nvidia’s latest chips are mostly encased in plastic packages and resemble an ant or a beetle with copper wires for legs. Each chip holds as many as 208 billion transistor switches and costs about $30,000. In a revolutionary breakthrough, these data-center chips no longer act independently like the central processing unit in your laptop. Instead, enmeshed by the thousands and even the millions in data centers, they function as a single “hyperscale” computer, with their collective thinking designated AI. The world’s supreme data center is Colossus 2 in Memphis, Tenn., engine of Elon Musk’s xAI. As the source for Grok and self-driving cars, Colossus 2 integrates an estimated one million Nvidia chips in one vast computer.

The “chip” has so captivated the minds of our time that even makers of new devices call its potential successor a “giant chip” or “superchip.” But the new device is in fact the opposite of a microchip, lacking separate processing units or memories in plastic packages with wire “legs.”