Asia is shifting.
So are your supply chains.
Geopolitics has gone from background noise to operating variable. As tensions rise between China, Taiwan and Japan, the knock-on effects are landing in Nordic hardtech faster than most founders expected. Supply chains, materials, customers, compliance — nothing is insulated anymore.
Issue #32 looks at why Asia’s tectonic shift matters right now, and what it means for the companies building the region’s next generation of hardware.
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Nordic Hardtech Radar
This Week: What an East Asian shock really means.
Geography Is Now Part of the Product
Asia’s tightening tech landscape is beginning to reshape European hardware in real time. A disruption in the Taiwan Strait wouldn’t just move containers; it would hit chips, minerals and manufacturing flows Nordic companies rely on. The next shock will be harder to predict. And much harder to design around.
Europe can no longer treat geopolitics as something happening elsewhere. Taiwan still dominates advanced semiconductor manufacturing. Counterpoint Research estimates that TSMC controlled around 71 % of the global advanced-node foundry market as of Q2 2025. And the Economics Observatory notes that over 90 % of the world’s most advanced logic chips were still produced in Taiwan’s ecosystem by 2023.
As AMD CEO Lisa Su put it in a July 2025 interview with Bloomberg:
“We have to consider the resiliency of the supply chain… not just the lowest cost, but also reliability and resiliency.”
A disruption in the Strait would ripple into Nordic robotics, power electronics, industrial controls and energy systems. Even partial interruptions could generate multi-percentage global GDP shocks, accordning to HCSS.
Regulatory pressure is rising too. The US, Japan and EU are tightening export controls on semiconductor equipment. China has countered with restrictions on critical minerals. In December 2024, Reuters reported that Beijing had banned exports of gallium, germanium and antimony These materials sit deep inside Nordic innovation: motors, magnets, batteries, photonics and defence electronics.
Semiconductors are only the first layer of exposure. China still refines much of the world’s rare earths and critical minerals used in motors, specialist alloys and energy systems. The EU’s 2024 Critical Raw Materials Act underscores just how concentrated global refining remains.
Nordic countries are building alternatives — new mines, cathode and anode capacity, metals recycling — but these chains are still early and cannot fully absorb a sudden shock. Customer exposure adds another constraint: many Nordic hardware firms sell into markets tied to Chinese industrial chains, especially in EVs and automation. As national-security rules expand, commercial logic will increasingly collide with geopolitical boundaries.
Resilience compounds
For founders, this is no longer a question of broad awareness but of engineering decisions. A geopolitical audit of the bill of materials often reveals concentration risks teams didn’t know they had. Mapping components to origin, refining steps and export-control exposure is becoming as necessary as cost modeling.
Design flexibility is now strategic. Supporting multiple chip families, avoiding single-source alloys or magnet types and designing PCBAs that tolerate substitution add complexity early but reduce fragility when supply chains shift. In a system shaped by geopolitics, resilience compounds.
Procurement must evolve as well. Supplier assessments cannot stop at price and delivery metrics. Ownership structure, regulatory exposure and geographic clustering increasingly determine operational continuity. Critical suppliers need to be treated as long-term partners, not interchangeable line items.
As Thierry Breton wrote in a November 2025 Guardian op-ed on Europe’s digital sovereignty:
“It must invest in research and critical infrastructure: sovereign cloud services, networks and satellites, semiconductors.”
Most Nordic companies are too small to operate fully under both US and Chinese regimes. Choosing a primary regulatory “home” early reduces the risk of forced pivots as dual-use classifications expand.
The global shift from efficiency to resilience favors regions with stable energy, engineering strength and predictable institutions — strengths the Nordics already possess. But advantage is not automatic. It depends on whether companies design for a world where geography now sits inside the product.
Whether geopolitics enters the building as a headline from the Strait or as an ERP alert reading “backorder – delivery unknown” depends very much on how prepared teams choose to be.
Lately ⏮️
Selected news from the hardtech ecosystem
- Speaking of geopolitical pressure points, the Netherlands is stepping back from its takeover of Nexperia, easing a China–EU standoff that strained automotive chip supplies.
- Saab makes a move in space as it leads a 10M USD investment in Pythom to accelerate lightweight, rapidly deployable launch systems — strengthening Sweden’s future space capability.
- Mats Karlsson receives the 2025 Polhem Prize for pioneering high-reliability internet connectivity in public transport. His work at Gothenburg-based Icomera helped turn trains and buses into rolling data nodes, now deployed in over 28,000 vehicles across 30 countries.
- Aris Machina breaks cover at Slush, as ex–Northvolt leaders launch an agentic OS for manufacturing — software built to tame factory chaos and make machines work together. A deeptech play worth watching.
- Eurostars opens a new window for Swedish hardtech this year, with fresh calls and expanded support for cross-border R&D. Vinnova highlights Epishine as a recent success case, proof that the programme can accelerate global scale for hardware innovation.
Up next ⏭️
What's brewing in the community?
- Robotics goes live in Sickla (Stockholm). A lunch-session on November 27 will showcase next-gen automation and offer sharp networking. Limited spots, sign up here.
- Internetdagarna (Nov 24–25) isn’t hardtech per se, but several sessions land close: digital sovereignty under geopolitical pressure, AI in enterprise operations, national security, and Lawrence Lessig on the future legal architecture of the internet — plus solid networking across policy and infrastructure.
- Hiring: A Nordic early-stage startup in connectivity and infrastructure is recruiting a Co-founder CTO to scale an IP-backed product. An interesting role for senior engineering builders.
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