There is a long and underappreciated list of things that America is running short on, and many of the most critical and fascinating rarely come up in the news cycle.
We all know about the domestic gaps in rare earth metal mining and refining, just as we’ve all heard about the shortages of motors and GPUs. Those are obviously important, but they’re also just the tip of the iceberg.
Take superconducting wire. Its global production is far less than a tenth of what we’ll need if we plan on building fusion reactors. Or helium, an element so light that once it escapes into the atmosphere, it’s gone forever. It’s extracted by only a handful of facilities globally as a byproduct of natural gas, which we’ve managed to run short of four separate times in twenty years, and on which every MRI machine, every chip fab, and every rocket launch depends. Or companies like TOTO, primarily known for its production of high-quality “bathroom solutions,” but which also happens to be the world’s leading supplier of advanced ceramics to the semiconductor industry. Of course, the list goes on from there. Companies across all industries are so often bottlenecked by products ranging from perchloric acid to pipettes and petri dishes, just as they can be bottlenecked by processes like welding or drilling.
Most of these constraints are invisible until they aren’t. And it’s not that they’re unsolvable either, many have clear paths forward, and some are already quietly being worked on. It’s surprising, however, how little attention they get relative to their importance. The solutions exist, or could exist, but they require someone to notice the problem first.
I’ve been seeking out bottlenecks for a while now. Partly because they show up often in the companies we look at, and partly because they’re genuinely fascinating. Most are not pure tales of scarcity, but serve as windows into how industries actually work, how capabilities get concentrated or lost, and what it takes to build something back. The causes can vary. Often it’s the result of a policy failure, or sometimes pure economic gravity, or the accident of one company being very good at something nobody else bothered to learn. Typically the closer you look, the more interesting it gets.
This series is our attempt to look closer. Each post will take one bottleneck, whether a material, a process, or a piece of infrastructure, and examine where it came from, why it matters, and what it would take to fix it. And occasionally, who is already trying.