Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology by Chris Miller examines how semiconductors (chips) have become foundational to global power, economic prosperity, and modern warfare. The book traces the rise of the chip industry, the fierce international competition for dominance—particularly among the US, Japan, Taiwan, and China—and the profound geopolitical implications of control over this essential technology.
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Key Themes and Insights:
Semiconductors' Centrality: The book opens by stressing that nearly every aspect of modern technology—phones, computers, cars, military weapons—relies on tiny silicon chips powered by billions of transistors.
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Historical Roots and Evolution:
The narrative starts during WWII, charting the birth and explosive growth of the chip industry.
The US initially dominated, spurred by defense needs—the Department of Defense once bought the majority of all integrated circuits produced.
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By the Vietnam and Gulf Wars, semiconductors had revolutionized military power, making modern warfare heavily reliant on precision computing and guided munitions.
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Global Competition:
While American firms led early innovation, by the 1980s, Japan challenged US dominance through superior manufacturing quality, especially in DRAM memory chips.
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Taiwan’s TSMC became the sole manufacturer of the world's most advanced processors, supplying a huge share of global computing power.
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ASML (Netherlands) controls all supply of the lithography equipment needed to make state-of-the-art chips.
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Offshoring and Vulnerabilities:
To keep costs low, US companies built complex global supply chains, concentrating critical steps (like advanced manufacturing) in East Asia.
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This offshoring has made the US and global economy vulnerable to supply chain shocks and geopolitical risks.
China’s Challenge and New Tech Cold War:
China invests massively in chip technology to reduce reliance on US and foreign suppliers, recognizing semiconductors’ strategic value for economic and military competitiveness.
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The struggle over chips is now a central front in the US-China rivalry, with export controls and industrial policies shaping the future.
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A hypothetical scenario in the book imagines how a military confrontation over Taiwan could cripple global chip supply, highlighting the stakes involved.
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Enormous Barriers to Entry:
Building a modern chip fabrication plant now costs over $20 billion and the technology becomes obsolete in just a few years.
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Every day, more transistors are produced than cells in the human body, underscoring both the complexity and scale of the industry.
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Key Figures:
The book profiles industry pioneers such as Morris Chang (TSMC), Akio Morita (Sony), and leaders from Intel, Samsung, and others, showing how personalities shaped corporate and national strategies.
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In summary, Chip War is both a history and a warning, arguing that controlling semiconductor technology is the defining geopolitical contest of our time, affecting not just economies but also the very nature of military and political power in the digital age.
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“The Trump administration’s announcement that it will allow the export of advanced H200 AI chips to China is a colossal economic and national security failure. The H200s are vastly more capable than anything China can make and gifting them to Beijing would squander America’s primary advantage in the AI race.
“Access to these chips would give China’s military transformational technology to make its weapons more lethal, carry out more effective cyberattacks against American businesses and critical infrastructure, and strengthen their economic and manufacturing sector. Chinese AI giant DeepSeek said as recently as last week that the lack of access to advanced American-designed AI chips is the single biggest impediment to its ability to compete with U.S. AI companies. With this decision, President Trump is poised to remove that barrier.
“Senate Democrats and Republicans both know that the 21st century will be defined by whether the leading AI systems are built on values of free societies and free markets or the repressive, authoritarian values of the Chinese Communist Party. The Trump administration clearly doesn’t grasp the urgency of this contest. President Trump must reverse course and recommit to preserving American dominance in AI.”
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