US announces ‘Pax Silica’ coalition to secure AI-era supply chains; India flagged as not included in initial group

Summary

Reporting highlighted the US-backed ‘Pax Silica’ initiative, a coalition centered on securing supply chains spanning critical minerals, semiconductors, and AI infrastructure—explicitly framed against China’s growing leverage. Business Standard emphasized that India was not part of the initial nine-country grouping, despite India’s large role in global chip design talent and its push to build domestic semiconductor capacity. Strategically, this is AI industrial policy in geopolitical form: compute capacity and upstream inputs (minerals, wafers, energy) are being treated as alliance assets, not just market commodities. For companies, it signals that procurement, export controls, and “trusted ecosystem” membership are becoming first-order product constraints—affecting where chips are made, where models are trained, and who can buy what.