Project TBD Press Release

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: Dustin J Ross & J Bliss Perry | Stanford Graduate School of Business

Project TBD Builds the Digital Nervous System of the Global Semiconductor Supply Chain

An AI-native compliance platform converts mandatory regulatory workflows into a living, proprietary ontology, giving enterprises, governments, and capital markets the real-time visibility needed to navigate and enable the globalization of tomorrow. Beginning with semiconductors, Project TBD will expand this infrastructure to other critical supply chains that define the modern economy.

STANFORD, CA — MARCH 2026

When a magnitude-7.4 earthquake struck Taiwan’s Hualien County in April 2024, the world’s largest chipmakers scrambled to assess exposure within hours and discovered that the tools to answer even basic questions did not exist. Which of our tier-2 and tier-3 suppliers are within 50 kilometers of TSMC’s fabs? What is the cascading revenue impact if CoWoS packaging capacity falls 15 percent for a quarter? The answers were buried in disconnected spreadsheets and the institutional memory of employees who had never been asked.

This is not a niche operations problem. It is the central fragility of the 21st-century economy—and it is the problem Project TBD was built to solve.

Today, Project TBD announced the development of a multi-tenant, proprietary digital twin of the global semiconductor industry: a continuously updated ontology mapping the relationships between firms, products, financial flows, and logistics pathways across the supply chain that makes every advanced economy run. Think Bloomberg Terminal for the global supply chain: a single, authoritative source of structured, real-time intelligence that every enterprise, government agency, and autonomous AI system can rely on. The platform gives enterprises, governments, and financial institutions the real-time structural visibility that the semiconductor industry has never had, enabling entirely new categories of intelligence, risk transfer, and financial products built on that foundation.

The Infrastructure Gap

Semiconductors are the defining commodity of this century. They are embedded in every defense system, every data center, every electric vehicle, and every consumer device manufactured anywhere in the world. The concentration of their production—roughly 90 percent of the most advanced logic chips fabricated within 200 miles of the Taiwan Strait—represents a geopolitical exposure with no modern parallel.

Consider how other strategic commodities manage comparable risk. Oil has 80 years of accumulated market infrastructure: CME futures contracts, Lloyd’s of London syndicate capacity, PIRA Analytics pricing indexes, and satellite tracking of every tanker on every ocean. Institutional investors can hedge crude exposure to the barrel; insurers can price refinery risk to the basis point. Semiconductors, by contrast, are still largely managed through bilateral relationships, reactive phone calls, and quarterly supplier surveys that are obsolete before they are published.

The market infrastructure for semiconductors has not kept pace with their strategic importance. As globalization enters a new phase—defined by re-regionalization, export controls, and industrial policy rather than frictionless integration—the stakes are only growing. That gap represents one of the largest unaddressed risks in the global economy, and the largest infrastructure opportunity.

“Every advanced economy on earth depends on a supply chain that almost no one can see clearly in real time. Bloomberg became the terminal through which global finance operates. We are building the equivalent for the global supply chain: a structured, living ontology that makes the semiconductor supply chain legible to both human analysts and autonomous AI systems. And we are using the regulatory frameworks that governments have already mandated as the engine to construct it.”

— Dustin J Ross, Co-Founder, Project TBD

The Entry Point: Compliance as a Data Acquisition Engine

Project TBD enters the market by solving the regulatory workflows that semiconductor firms are already legally required to perform: unavoidable, recurring obligations with real consequences for non-compliance. Each generates proprietary, structured data about who is doing business with whom, what materials are crossing which borders, and where regulatory risk is accumulating. Together, they construct the digital twin from the inside out.

• Supplier Onboarding & Restricted Party Screening. Every new supplier relationship requires continuous screening against the U.S. Entity List, OFAC SDN list, BIS Denied Persons, and the UFLPA Entity List. Project TBD automates this and captures the resulting supplier graph: which firms source from which, at what tiers, and through which intermediaries.
• Export & Import Control Verification (ITAR / EAR / ECCN). Every cross-border shipment requires ECCN classification and end-user review under EAR and ITAR. Project TBD automates the determination and generates a real-time record of product flows, technology transfer pathways, and jurisdictional exposure across the network.
• Forced Labor & Country-of-Origin Tracing (UFLPA). UFLPA creates a rebuttable presumption that goods with Xinjiang-origin materials are tainted, placing the burden of proof on the importer. Project TBD automates multi-tier origin tracing and builds a proprietary map of upstream material sourcing relationships in the process.
• Government Mandatory Disclosures (CHIPS Act, CFIUS, EU Battery Passport). CHIPS Act recipients file domestic content disclosures; foreign acquisitions trigger CFIUS beneficial ownership reviews; EU Battery Passport rules require materials traceability. Each filing generates structured data on ownership structures, capital flows, and materials provenance that Project TBD ingests into the digital twin.

The result is a compounding data asset. Every compliance transaction adds another node, edge, and data point to the digital twin—more complete and more valuable with every customer and every workflow. Unlike databases built through manual curation, this ontology is grounded in live regulatory activity: a record of what is actually happening in the supply chain, not simply a model.

The Intelligence Platform

The digital twin powers a sequenced intelligence platform, each capability built on the last:

• Agentic Simulation. An AI-native scenario modeling environment where analysts interrogate the digital twin conversationally—stress-testing the impact of a Taiwan Strait closure, a TSMC fab shutdown, or a sudden UFLPA delisting on their specific supply chain in real time. Not a dashboard. An agentic co-pilot for supply chain strategy.
• Real-Time Disruption Alerting. Automated detection of supply chain shocks—geopolitical, regulatory, logistical, and natural—with immediate diagnosis of customer-specific impact and recommended response actions.
• Predictive Risk Modeling. Forward-looking models that identify concentration risk, emerging bottlenecks, and cascading failure modes before they become visible in production data.
• Automated Remediation. Contingency sourcing recommendations and alternative routing options, drawn from the cross-customer network, when disruptions are detected or forecast.
• Recommendation Marketplace. Cross-customer matching of supply and demand in real time—connecting excess capacity with acute shortage across the network and facilitating transactions at the moment they matter most.

“We show customers the destination first: an AI co-pilot that can model the impact of a Taiwan crisis on their supply chain before the crisis hits. Then we say—to build that for you, we start by solving your compliance burden. The compliance product gets us in the door. The digital twin is the business. And the business is enabling the globalization of tomorrow.”

— J Bliss Perry, Co-Founder, Project TBD

The Long-Term Vision: The Financial Nervous System of Global Commerce

Project TBD’s ambition is not to build a better compliance tool. It is to build the financial and analytical nervous system for the reindustrialization of the global economy, and to become the infrastructure layer that enables enterprises everywhere to participate confidently in the next era of globalization.

The world is not deglobalizing; it is re-globalizing: supply chains are being restructured, not eliminated, around new regulatory frameworks, geopolitical realities, and industrial policy mandates. The CHIPS and Science Act commits $52 billion to rebuild domestic semiconductor manufacturing; the EU, Japan, and South Korea are executing parallel national strategies; the NDAA restricts the defense industrial base from adversarial suppliers. Each policy creates new compliance obligations, capital allocation decisions, and supply chain reconfigurations, all requiring the real-time structural intelligence that Project TBD is building.

The proprietary data asset is designed to enable financial infrastructure that does not yet exist for the semiconductor industry—because the underlying data to price that risk has never existed before:

• Parametric Insurance. Custom parametric policies priced off the real-time state of the digital twin; payouts triggered by objective supply chain events, not loss adjusters. Project TBD originates the risk and syndicates to capital markets without holding balance-sheet exposure.
• Capacity Hedging & Forward Allocation Instruments. Futures-style instruments for semiconductor capacity, allowing manufacturers to hedge lead-time exposure and enabling capital markets to price and transfer systematic supply chain risk for the first time.
• Prediction Market Middleware. Integrating the ontology with institutional prediction market platforms to create the first institutional-grade market for semiconductor geopolitical risk.
• Government Infrastructure Partnership. Democratic governments have no consolidated, real-time view of the semiconductor supply chains on which national security depends. Project TBD serves as back-end data infrastructure for federal semiconductor oversight—a single contract that creates the most valuable industrial intelligence asset in the world.
• The Transactional Fabric. The platform ultimately evolves from intelligence to transaction—intermediating capacity reservations and supply-demand matching during shocks, becoming the fabric through which the semiconductor industry routes around disruption.

Bloomberg became indispensable not because it had better data, but because it became the infrastructure through which capital markets operated. Project TBD is building the equivalent for the global semiconductor supply chain: the structured, real-time ontology that every enterprise, government, and autonomous AI system will rely on to navigate the industrial economy.

Semiconductors are the oil of the 21st century. The nations that secured energy supply chains commanded the industrial economy; those that did not were left dependent. The calculus today is identical—and the stakes are higher. Every advanced weapon system, every AI model, every electric vehicle, and every communications network runs on chips. The concentration of that production in a narrow geography is the central strategic vulnerability of the American economy, and the central opportunity for American leadership.

Leadership is not declared; it is built in the infrastructure, data standards, and financial instruments that the world comes to depend on. America built the internet, the global financial system, and the logistics networks that underpin modern trade. The question for this generation is whether America will also build the intelligence infrastructure of the global semiconductor supply chain, or whether that will be built elsewhere, on terms that reflect different values.

Project TBD is building that infrastructure in the United States, with the American industrial base as its foundation. Not to exclude the world, but to lead it.

About Project TBD

Project TBD is building a multi-tenant, proprietary digital twin of the global semiconductor industry. Founded by Dustin J Ross and J Bliss Perry at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, the company uses compliance workflows as a data acquisition engine to construct a continuously updated ontology of the semiconductor supply chain, monetized through intelligence products, risk management tools, and financial infrastructure. The platform is AI-native by design: every interface built to be invoked by autonomous agents, every data structure optimized for LLM interaction.

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