From what I remember of various new articles over the past three years (I'm not going to go find all these articles over such a broad time span, I'll leave veri

From what I remember of various new articles over the past three years (I'm not going to go find all these articles over such a broad time span, I'll leave verification as an exercise to the reader) there are a large number of contributing factors. - Long time push for "just in time" supply chains. A lot of manufacturers stopped keeping a local stock of chips they needed for the next 6 months of manufacturing to save on storage costs. This is fine as long as there are no hiccups in any earlier part of the supply chain (this transition has been happening over the last 15-20 years). - Crypto-coin mining and the sudden extreme demand of graphics cards. This has been going on for a long time. A lot of low-nanometer demand goes to a large number of graphic cards and ASICs for mining crypto-currency. This led to the graphics card bottleneck that existed for the last 3 or so generations of graphics cards. - pre-COVID there were several (I want to say Taiwanese) fab plants that were destroyed due to Typhoons. This led to reduced production capacity. - There was contamination of shipments of silicon wafers which disrupted production in several fabs. This was a pretty short delay more than anything but it was a contributing factor. - At least one US based Fab was closed. I believe some other international fabs also closed down either temporarily due to COVID or permanently for other reasons. Some fabs were acquired by major companies and likely switched their production pushing more pressure on other fabs. - Global politics. There was a lot of aggressive changes to global policy during this time frame that forced a redistribution of where certain chips were being manufactured adding more work for all fabs (retooling, reworking designs, getting a design working in a new fab). - The canceling of car chips actually relieved the pressure on the fabs as they were able to take other fab orders. I don't think this slowed down fabrication in general, but when the car manufacturers realized they actually did need that capacity and more, the capacity had already been sold to other customers. This is entirely on the car manufacturers and is only kind of related to the overall chip shortage. - Global distribution issues. This isn't just in the final stage of consumer products that has been affected but also raw supplies affecting the rate some chips can be manufactured. - Increased demand overall. Consumer consumption of chips has increased pretty dramatically over the last decade pretty consistently as everything wants to be connected to the internet now from your toaster, to your butt plug. - Complexity and difficulty in building up a new fab. These are incredibly specialized facilities costing in the 9 figures to setup the facility. The people that work in these facilities are highly specialized not just in the profession but to the intricacies of that specific facility and their pipeline. Training up these extremely skilled labor tasks can't be done quickly.