Chris Miller (12)

There's a lot going on in this book. It covers history, technology, engineering, economics, business strategies, government, and international relations over more than seventy years. The audience for each of these often has little interest in the others. As such, it has taken on more than most books. It's heaviest on history but chips are in the headlines even today as I write this. Reading this book will help anyone understand why The Chips Act had bipartisan support and is one of President show more Biden's most prominent accomplishments. The news coverage is full of ground-breaking announcements in several states, especially the battleground states of the 2024 election. There's one important downside here. This field is moving so fast this book is already out of date, even though it was published in 2022. It does discuss GPUs, NVIDIA, and even artificial intelligence, but it never mentions ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Copilot, Large Language Models. While these are all software, they are altering the chip world, and war, dramatically.

The most important thing I realized reading this book is the importance of the difference between designing chips and manufacturing them at scale. I knew there was a difference, but I did not appreciate both how dramatic and how important the difference is. While the United States has been the king of chips, other countries, especially China, are ready to challenge that leadership. And it’s the difference between design and manufacturing, or as they refer to it, fabricating, that's at the heart of that challenge. The U.S. dominates the design side of chips. That has captured the world's attention. What has been obvious to many is designing is just one side of the story. Other countries dominate the fabrication side, most notably Taiwan and China. The U.S. now sees this as a strategic vulnerability and is taking steps to correct that situation. The Chips Act subsidizes companies that choose to build chip manufacturing facilities in the United States. That's state subsidization, a long time no-no of free trade which has long dominated U.S. trade policy. But the downsides of what free trade has wrought in the world of chips are no longer acceptable. While the U.S. is playing catchup, there are significant headwinds which will delay this process.

This book is an excellent source to understand the headwinds. And there are several. Just looking at the present makes it obvious that change will require upsetting an applecart that is working exceedingly well for several big players. Some will argue that change will likely disturb partners that have worked well together so far and indeed have contracts that bind them for some time into the future. U.S. companies need to rely on their foreign partners to deliver on promises they've already made, so the present works against change for the future. Another headwind is the fact that chips can never be totaled divorced from the products they are used in. While chips are everywhere, the two the most important are electronic devices, such as computers and cell phones, and cars and trucks, both today's gas versions and tomorrow’s electric versions. Almost all are either manufactured or assembled outside the U.S. Think Apple products assembled in China and many Tesla's. While chips are small, if they are fabricated where they will be used, costs will be lower. Supply chains understand that logic. Another headwind is time. It takes a significant amount of time to both design and build at scale. Changing gears will involve significant time delays. Existing players enjoy significant lead having spent years developing their position. Along with time is money. A significant barrier to entry, as well as a high likelihood of failure, is the significant startup cost. Table stakes are exorbitant. There's also unpredictability. What will tomorrow bring? It makes it harder to convince others of your vision. And then there's the difficulty of speed. Making chips faster normally involves making things smaller. We've reached a point where the engineering required to make things smaller is reaching atomic limits. Only one firm in the world, a Dutch firm, ASML, is currently capable of building the machines that can create the chips at the atomic level required. There's no competition. Their machines are huge, very expensive, and take a long time to build. This roadblock sits across all development in this area. Major headwind.

Fortunately, there are still people who are ready to join the fray. Most of the activity is at the design stage. While today NVIDIA dominates the GPUs needed for the enormous needs of artificial intelligence software, several others are working on alternatives including Google, Apple, Intel, and AMD. Development on the design side is funded by these huge corporations. Intel has long dominated the workstation and server market with its famous slogan and logo, "Intel inside". Intel has a long-term problem. It's relatively unique as it has both designed and fabricated chips. It has also played both sides by having installations in both the U.S. and overseas. But their fabrication machines are oriented toward the older x86 design, which is less demanding on tolerance. The chips of the future require much higher tolerance to achieve the denser packing needed to create faster and smaller chips. The old machines can't compete. Intel has to build new factories with new machines. A costly and time-consuming process. AMD has reverse engineered the x86 Intel chips and has taken market share from Intel. They've spun off their fabrication facilities. That should allow them to focus on design. Apple eventually abandoned Motorola for Intel, but more recently is designing their own chips for their computers and cell phones. The fabrication side is different. There is one major player that dominates that market, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, TSMC. It fabricates chips but is even better known for assembling consumer electronics for Apple and others. More recently, the major news is that TSMC fabricates the GPUs designed by NVIDIA. TSMC is based in Taiwan but has major installations in China, India, and Vietnam. TSMC and Intel are taken advantage of the Chips Act and are building plants to fabricate chips in the US.

While this book follows major trends, there are several people, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk that are barely mentioned – Gates and Musk mentioned on one page, Bezos, never. Yes, their focus was elsewhere, so this may make sense. My guess is they were players in the chip world as well. show less

This is a great book. Informative, accessible, no fat. Most of all, reassuring. I had some reservations when I picked it up because Chris Miller is a history professor at Tufts, not a journalist.

I need not have worried. Nothing fancy, not too colorful but the text gets the job done. There is a brief history of semiconductors, starting with the inventors of the transistor at Texas Instruments. I had actually edited news stories by a chips reporter, but only now do I understand the different show more kinds of chips (DRAM, logic, microprocessors) and who among AMD, Intel, Micron, Qualcomm, SMIC, Micron, Sk Hynix, etc. makes what.

I already knew about TSMC and Nvidia, though don't expect too much about AI here, given the 2022 publication date. Then there is ASML, the Dutch lithography firm with its EUV (extreme ultraviolet) tools (although it needs some US components).

Reassuring: If you're worried that China will soon overtake the West, whether by AI or by cyber spying, Chip War makes clear how many (very large and expensive) pieces it would need to put together. Take, ASML, which is the only lithography firm left standing: a single standard machine costs $200 million to $400 million. Let's say Chinese spies somehow steal blueprints. Like Saddam's bomb makers, they would also need to scour the world to scare up all the soft and hard tools. When they were done, ASML models would be a few new generations ahead.

While the US needs a new Andy Grove ..."its control over many of the choke points, including software and machinery is as strong as ever."

This book will also interest anyone who has followed US tech trade policy in the past few decades. Going back to the rivalry with Japan, Washington settled on "run faster" policy rather than attempt to keep technology at home. Thus, we also had US companies setting up factories in East Asia and the US not attempting to compete with heavy subsidies and incentives. Off-shoring expertise.

Besides, the supply chain for semiconductors is so complex! Silicon Valley wants to sell its components even when it's obvious, the buyers will eventually kill a US business. So, yeah, the Pentagon by 2007 recognized what was happening. Some things you can't outrun.

Leaders in companies in the semiconductor sphere realized it at some level. It reminds me of the short-sighted mindset of so many foreign companies in China, say, auto companies: if it's not forced tech transfer, the product or software is being sneaked out the back door.

But they're selling something in the meantime and hey, consider the potential in the size of the population! Leave long-term thinking is up to their governments! I was so pleasantly relieved upon Biden's election, when right away Jake Sullivan unveiled a chip strategy, including export controls and bringing a TSMC plant to the US. Now whether Trump can hold firm ... show less

I tackled this as an audiobook, and it’s an extensive, well-structured account of the history of semiconductor chips and their central role in shaping modern technology, economics, and geopolitical power. Miller situates the development of chips firmly within the global political landscape, showing how something physically tiny has become foundational to military strength, economic resilience, and the way we all live day to day.

One of the book’s biggest strengths is its accessibility. show more Despite dealing with cutting-edge, highly complex technology, the narrative never feels exclusionary. Miller consistently strikes the right balance between technical accuracy and clarity, allowing non-technologists to follow not just how chips work, but why supply chains, fabrication capacity, and national policy decisions matter so profoundly. The historical grounding, tied to recognisable world events and current tensions, makes the stakes feel concrete rather than abstract.

The tone of the writing is excellent: calm, confident, and quietly urgent. However, the audiobook narration didn’t always support that strength. The delivery is quite monotone, to the point that it occasionally undercut the tension and fascination of the subject matter. As a result, it took me far longer to get through the book than I expected, despite being genuinely absorbed by the content. It’s a clear example of how much narration can shape the experience of an audiobook.

Overall, this is a fascinating and important book, particularly for anyone interested in the intersection of technology, power, and global politics. It made me far more aware of how exposed modern societies are to disruptions in chip production and supply - and how central these invisible components have become to almost everything else. show less

Computer chips are the foundational commodity of the cultures and lifestyles of the 21st century. In this book, Chris Miller outlines the way in which we've come further than ever thought possible by the inventors of the computer chip, and, how the computer chip supply chain is precariously centralized.

Similar to the way that Yasha Levine, in "Surveillance Valley," establishes that a history of the internet is a military history, the history of computer chips is a military history. During show more the first twenty years of their development, 95% of revenues of computer chip companies came from (US) defense contracts.

Ever wonder where the term "debugging" comes from? Back when computers were composed of tubes, sometimes the tubes would attract moths, and sometimes the moths would damage the tubes (likely losing their lives in the process). "Debugging," was the process of removing the moths, cleaning up the circuitry, and replacing any blown tubes.

The first quarter of the 21st century has thus far also been the story of a growing cold war between China and the United States. This book describes these fronts from the perspectives of chips. Did you know that maintaining cutting-edge chip technology requires hundreds of billions of dollars of investment on an annual basis? Miller points out that, not even the US military budget (currently running at about three quarters of a trillion dollars a year) or Apple (with $360 billion in revenues in 2021) would be able to single-handedly maintain cutting edge chip infrastructure. It is necessarily a global, or at least multinational, project.

The technology required to make chips sounds like science fiction. Extreme ultra-violet light (closer in wavelength to x-ray than visible light) is produced by vaporizing droplets of tin with a massively powerful laser 50,000 times per second. This is then reflected on a mirror whose surface, if blow up to the size of Germany, would have tenth-of-a-millimeter variances in flatness, and would be able to aim well enough to hit a golf ball at the range of the moon. Chips have gotten so small that conventional electrical engineering becomes a poor map of reality and quantum tunneling is a challenge (where electrons show up in the "wrong" place).

Moore's law predicted the doubling in chip capacity, but only for one decades time. It has continued, unrelenting, for the past half century. That said, this is no reason to believe this breakneck pace of progress will be sustainable.

Are you curious about the provenance and history of the building blocks of modern life, and curious about the geopolitical tensions that result from the power that comes along with such technology? If so, then this is the book for you! show less