China Has Bypassed Silicon Valley with Its Own Innovation

About a week ago, a viral online post claimed that China had effectively “killed the silicon wafer” on July 19.

The post made bold assertions: a breakthrough in a new semiconductor material called indium selenide (InSe) had supposedly rendered the Western chip industry — from Intel’s fabrication plants to TSMC’s factories and even U.S. sanctions — instantly outdated.

According to the post, China hadn’t just won the chip war; it had moved beyond it entirely by discovering a new principle of atomic physics.

Like many viral internet claims, this was a dramatic exaggeration. However, it was based on a real and significant scientific development. On July 18, researchers from Peking University and Renmin University of China published a paper describing a new technique for mass-producing high-quality InSe wafers.

Although silicon’s dominance won’t end immediately, this discovery marks a serious step forward. While Western nations are focused on controlling current chip technologies, China is pushing forward to pioneer the next generation.

Comparing the viral hype with the scientific facts reveals a more complex, yet just as important, story — one that touches on the future of technology, global power dynamics, and the materials that will drive our digital world.

Let’s explore what this breakthrough really means for China, the West, and the semiconductor industry. We’ll end with my Product of the Week: the HyperX QuadCast 2 S microphone.

Inside China’s InSe Wafer Breakthrough

The viral post was right about one thing: the biggest challenge in producing InSe has been achieving atomic-level precision, specifically in stoichiometry.

InSe is a two-dimensional material, forming layers only a few atoms thick. To work properly as a semiconductor, it needs an exact one-to-one ratio of indium to selenium. Even slight imbalances create flaws that ruin its performance. Unlike silicon, which is flexible and easily engineered, InSe is extremely sensitive.

Chinese scientists solved this by developing a new method: they heated amorphous InSe film along with solid indium in a sealed environment. The vaporized indium forms a liquid interface, enabling atomically perfect InSe crystals to grow in a self-correcting process.

Importantly, they scaled this from tiny lab samples to 5 cm wafers and even built functional transistor arrays — showing the material is suitable for real-world chip manufacturing. This step, moving from lab to scalable production, is where many advanced materials have failed before.

The Potential of a ‘Golden’ Semiconductor

The enthusiasm for InSe is well-founded. As silicon chips reach their physical limits, the tech industry is searching for new materials to keep Moore’s Law — the idea that chip performance doubles roughly every two years — alive.

Often called a “golden” semiconductor, InSe is a strong contender for the post-silicon era due to its exceptional properties.