In our hyper-connected world, we take for granted the magic inside our smartphones, computers, and cars. Yet, the tiny silicon chips that power our reality are at the center of a geopolitical firestorm. “Chip War” solves the mystery of this invisible conflict, revealing how the fight for semiconductor supremacy is the single most important struggle shaping the future of global power.
The 21st-century global order is being determined not by armies or oceans, but by control over the design and fabrication of semiconductors, the microscopic bedrock of modern civilization, making the battle for this critical technology the new great game for global dominance.
Evidence Snapshot
Chris Miller’s thesis is built on a mountain of evidence, drawing from historical archives on three continents and over a hundred interviews with the scientists, CEOs, and government officials who built the industry.
Key case studies include the Cold War space race that funded the first integrated circuits , the fierce US-Japan trade war over memory chips in the 1980s , the strategic rise of Taiwan’s TSMC as the world’s indispensable chip foundry , and the current high-stakes confrontation between the United States and China over companies like Huawei, which the US has effectively kneecapped by leveraging technological choke points.
Best For / Not For
Best for: Anyone seeking to understand the real levers of power in the modern world. This book is essential reading for students and professionals in technology, international relations, economics, and modern history.
If you’re curious about the backstory of Silicon Valley, the intricacies of the US-China rivalry, or the hidden vulnerabilities in our global supply chains, you will love this book.
Not for: Readers looking for a light, casual read or a highly technical engineering textbook. While Miller makes the technology accessible, the book is dense with historical detail and geopolitical analysis that demands the reader’s full attention.
Unveiling the Silicon Empire: A Deep Dive into Chris Miller’s Chip War
In an age defined by digital technology, the term “Chip War” might sound like the title of a science fiction novel. However, as Chris Miller so brilliantly illustrates in his seminal work, “Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology,” this war is not fiction—it is the defining reality of our time. It’s a silent, high-stakes conflict fought not with soldiers, but with silicon wafers, software, and impossibly complex machines.
This article provides a comprehensive exploration of Miller’s masterpiece, a book so insightful and thorough that it has become essential reading in the halls of government and the boardrooms of Silicon Valley.
We will delve into its core arguments, unpack its intricate historical narrative, and analyze its profound implications, offering a guide so complete that you’ll grasp the full scope of the global chip war and why it dictates our future.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction: The World on a Wafer
Title and Author Information: Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology was written by Chris Miller and first published in a hardcover edition by Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc., in October 2022.
Context: Chris Miller is an Associate Professor of International History at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. His background as an economic and geopolitical historian provides the perfect lens through which to analyze the semiconductor industry.
Chip War is a masterclass in narrative non-fiction, skillfully blending economic history, technological evolution, and sharp geopolitical analysis to tell the story of the most critical and contested resource of the modern era. The book won the prestigious Financial Times Business Book of the Year award in 2022, cementing its status as a vital contemporary work.
The book’s central thesis is that semiconductors have replaced oil as the world’s most critical resource, and that control over the chip supply chain is now the primary determinant of geopolitical power. Miller argues that “the rivalry between the United States and China may well be determined by computing power”.
He meticulously traces how a tiny number of companies and countries have come to dominate this foundational technology, creating a fragile global system riddled with dangerous choke points and vulnerabilities that now lie at the heart of international conflict.
2. Summary: The 75-Year Saga of Silicon Supremacy
To truly understand the “Chip War,” one must journey back to its origins. Miller structures his book as a sprawling historical epic, and by following its narrative, we can see how the present-day conflict was forged over decades of innovation, competition, and strategic maneuvering. This extended summary will guide you through the book’s main arguments and historical arcs, chapter by chapter, part by part.
Part I: Cold War Chips — From Steel to Silicon
The story begins in the aftermath of a war decided by industrial might. World War II, Miller notes, was a “typhoon of steel”. But the atomic bombs that ended it hinted that future conflicts would be defined by new technologies.
The immediate postwar challenge for computing was the limitation of its core component: the vacuum tube. These glass tubes, which acted as electric switches, were large, unreliable, and power-hungry.
Early computers like the ENIAC contained 18,000 of them, required constant “debugging” to remove moths attracted to their light, and often burned out. A smaller, faster, more reliable switch was needed.
That switch emerged from Bell Labs in New Jersey. In a story of brilliant collaboration and bitter rivalry, scientists John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and the notoriously abrasive William Shockley invented the transistor in 1947.
Made from a unique class of materials called semiconductors, the transistor could amplify electric signals and, crucially, act as a solid-state switch. Shockley, though furious that his colleagues made the initial breakthrough, conceptualized a more manufacturable design and “had designed a switch” that would become the foundation of all digital computing.
The next great leap was the integrated circuit. The problem was that connecting thousands of individual transistors created a “jungle of complexity”. In 1958, an engineer at Texas Instruments (TI) named Jack Kilby had a breakthrough: he figured out how to build multiple electronic components on the same single piece of semiconductor material. Months later, at a new California startup called Fairchild Semiconductor, a charismatic visionary named
Bob Noyce independently invented a more elegant and manufacturable version using a “planar” process that built the transistors into the silicon block. This device—multiple circuits integrated onto a single piece of silicon—became known simply as the chip.
But who would buy these new, expensive chips? The answer came from the heavens. The Soviet Union’s 1957 launch of Sputnik sparked a crisis of confidence in America and fueled the Cold War space race. NASA, tasked with putting a man on the moon, became the first major customer.
The Apollo guidance computer needed to be powerful yet small and light. Fairchild’s integrated circuits were the only solution, and NASA’s trust was a crucial “stamp of approval”. Simultaneously, the U.S. Air Force needed a guidance computer for its Minuteman II nuclear missile. TI’s Pat Haggerty promised a computer using Kilby’s chips would be smaller, lighter, and more powerful.
The military contract was transformative; by 1965, “20 percent of all integrated circuits sold that year went to the Minuteman program” , providing the initial “liftoff” for the entire industry.
The final piece of the puzzle was mass production. This came from another defense-funded innovation: photolithography. An engineer named Jay Lathrop, tasked with shrinking electronics for a mortar shell, had the ingenious idea to essentially turn a microscope upside down, using a lens and light-sensitive chemicals called photoresists to “print” tiny patterns onto silicon wafers. This technique, Miller emphasizes, was what made it “possible to imagine mass-producing tiny transistors”. Engineers like
Morris Chang at TI and Andy Grove at Fairchild then spent years perfecting the manufacturing “yield”—the percentage of working chips—through methodical trial and error, turning a scientific curiosity into a world-changing industry.
Part II: The Circuitry of the American World
With military funding secured and mass production underway, Silicon Valley‘s pioneers, led by Bob Noyce, turned their attention to a much larger market: civilians. Noyce believed “the civilian computer market, not the military, that would drive chip demand”. He began aggressively cutting prices to make chips affordable for commercial computers. This vision was codified in 1965 when Fairchild co-founder
Gordon Moore wrote a short article for Electronics magazine. He noticed that the number of components on a chip was doubling roughly every year, and predicted this exponential growth would continue. This prediction became the industry’s guiding principle:
Moore’s Law. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy that drove relentless innovation and cost reduction, leading Moore to foresee “home computers” and “personal portable communications equipment” decades before they existed.
While America innovated, its primary adversary, the Soviet Union, struggled to keep up. The Soviets understood the importance of semiconductors, even translating Shockley’s textbook into Russian. They established their own “Silicon Valley“—a science city called Zelenograd—and poured resources into it.
They even benefited from KGB spies who defected from the U.S.. However, their entire strategy was fundamentally flawed. Under Minister Alexander Shokin, the official policy was simple: “Copy it”. Soviet spies would acquire Western chips, and engineers would be ordered to replicate them.
Miller explains why this was doomed to fail. “Copying worked in building nuclear weapons,” he writes, because only a few were needed. But semiconductors required mass production of millions of flawless devices. Stealing a chip “didn’t explain how it was made, just as stealing a cake can’t explain how it was baked”.
The Soviets lacked the ecosystem of pure materials, precision machinery, and, most importantly, the tacit manufacturing know-how that could not be stolen from a blueprint. While Silicon Valley raced forward according to Moore’s Law, the Soviets were always years behind, perpetually copying last year’s technology.
In stark contrast was America’s Cold War ally, Japan. Instead of trying to steal and copy, Japan was deliberately integrated into the American semiconductor ecosystem. Visionary entrepreneurs like Akio Morita, co-founder of Sony, licensed the transistor patent from AT&T for $25,000.
While American firms focused on military and computer applications, Sony revolutionized consumer electronics, creating the transistor radio and later the iconic Walkman. This created a symbiotic relationship: U.S. firms designed the most advanced chips for computers, while Japanese firms like Sony became massive consumers of chips for their globally popular products.
This strategy, Miller notes, was “core to America’s Cold War strategy,” turning Japan into a prosperous democratic capitalist ally.
As the industry grew, so did the need for cheaper labor. The delicate process of packaging chips and connecting them with tiny gold wires was done by hand, mostly by women workers production managers believed had “smaller hands” and were more “willing to tolerate monotonous work”. To drive down costs, Fairchild executive Charlie Sporck pioneered the offshoring of chip assembly, first to Hong Kong and then to other parts of Asia like Singapore and Malaysia, where wages were a fraction of those in the US and unions were weak or nonexistent.
This was the birth of the global semiconductor supply chain, creating a network that bound America’s Asian allies closer to its economy and provided a bulwark against communism. Miller calls this “supply chain statecraft”.
Meanwhile, the chips themselves were revolutionizing warfare. The “dumb” bombs of the Vietnam War missed their targets most of the time. But engineers at Texas Instruments, led by Weldon Word, developed the Paveway laser-guided bomb, which strapped a simple silicon sensor and a couple of transistors to a standard bomb, turning it into a “tool of precision destruction”.
At the Pentagon, theorists like Andrew Marshall and officials like William Perry realized that America’s lead in microelectronics could be used to “offset” the Soviet Union’s massive quantitative advantage in tanks and troops.
This “offset strategy” poured money into precision-guided munitions, advanced sensors, and satellite communications, laying the groundwork for America’s high-tech military dominance for decades to come.
Part III: Leadership Lost? The Japanese Challenge
By the 1980s, the student had become the master. The symbiotic relationship with Japan turned into a fierce rivalry. At an industry conference in 1980, a Hewlett-Packard executive presented shocking data: the best Japanese-made memory chips had a failure rate of zero, while chips from the best American firms failed 0.19 percent of the time.
American DRAM chips “worked the same, cost the same, but malfunctioned far more often”. Japan had perfected mass manufacturing.
Silicon Valley‘s leaders, like AMD’s flamboyant CEO Jerry Sanders and National Semiconductor’s Charlie Sporck, felt they were in an unfair fight. “We’re at war with Japan,” Sporck insisted, “an economic war with technology, productivity, and quality”. They accused Japan of industrial espionage, protecting its home market, and receiving unfair government subsidies.
But Miller argues the biggest factor was Japan’s access to cheap capital. Japanese chipmakers were part of vast conglomerates with close ties to banks that provided seemingly unlimited, low-interest loans, allowing them to invest heavily in new factories even during downturns.
American firms, subject to the pressures of Wall Street, couldn’t compete. By the mid-1980s, Intel, the company that had pioneered DRAMs, was left with only 1.7 percent of the global market.
The crisis extended to the complex machinery used to make chips. The American company GCA Corporation had invented the “stepper,” a critical piece of lithography equipment, and held a monopoly in the early 1980s.
But due to mismanagement, arrogance, and a failure to listen to customers, it quickly lost its lead to Japanese competitors Nikon and Canon. This loss was a dire warning. “Lithography is ‘simply something we can’t lose,'” one Defense Department official warned, “or we will find ourselves completely dependent on overseas manufacturers”. America’s lead in the “crude oil of the 1980s” seemed to be slipping away.
The response from Silicon Valley was twofold. First, they turned to Washington for help, forming the Semiconductor Industry Association to lobby the government. This led to the 1986 U.S.-Japan Semiconductor Agreement, which aimed to stop Japanese firms from “dumping” chips below cost and to open Japan’s market. Second, the industry and the Pentagon collaborated to form
Sematech, a research consortium funded jointly by industry and government to improve manufacturing techniques. It was led by the legendary Bob Noyce, but its efforts, particularly in trying to save American lithography firms like GCA, were largely a failure. The U.S. seemed to be in a “death spiral”.
This perception of American decline and Japanese ascendancy was perfectly captured in a provocative 1989 book co-authored by Sony’s Akio Morita and nationalist politician Shintaro Ishihara, The Japan That Can Say No. Ishihara pointed out Japan’s near-total dominance of cutting-edge memory chips and argued that Japan could tip the Cold War military balance by selling these chips to the USSR instead of the U.S.. It seemed the world order was about to be rewritten by Japanese technology.
Part IV: America Resurgent
Just as Japan’s dominance seemed insurmountable, the tide began to turn, driven by scrappy American entrepreneurs and painful corporate transformations. One of the unlikeliest heroes was Jack Simplot, an Idaho billionaire who had made his fortune in potatoes, supplying McDonald’s with french fries.
As every major American company fled the DRAM market, Simplot invested millions in a tiny Boise-based startup called Micron. He saw what the Silicon Valley PhDs didn’t: DRAMs had become a commodity, and the best time to enter a commodity business is when prices are low and everyone else is getting out.
Micron survived and eventually thrived by being ruthlessly focused on cost-cutting and efficient design, outmaneuvering both its Japanese and Silicon Valley rivals.
The most crucial turnaround came from Intel. Under the relentless, paranoid leadership of Andy Grove, the company made a gut-wrenching decision. Realizing it could never win back the memory market, Intel chose to exit the business it had created and bet its entire future on a different type of chip: the microprocessor.
A small contract to supply the processor for IBM’s new “personal computer” in 1980 provided a glimmer of hope. Grove then undertook a brutal restructuring, laying off thousands of employees and forcing a “copy exactly” manufacturing discipline inspired by the Japanese. The gamble paid off spectacularly.
The PC market exploded, and almost every computer ran on Microsoft’s software and an “Intel Inside” processor, creating one of the most profitable monopolies in business history.
America’s resurgence was also fueled by finding a new, cheaper partner to counter Japan. As Bob Noyce told Andy Grove, “my enemy’s enemy is my friend”. That new friend was South Korea. Conglomerates like
Samsung, led by Lee Byung-Chul, saw an opening in the brutal US-Japan DRAM competition. With massive support from the Korean government and technology licensed from struggling American firms like Micron, Samsung entered the DRAM market and, with its own focus on manufacturing excellence, eventually dethroned the Japanese. Silicon Valley was happy to help, seeing Korea as a way to prevent a Japanese monopoly on memory chips.
Finally, the Pentagon’s “offset strategy” from the 1970s came to devastating fruition in the 1991 Persian Gulf War. The world watched on CNN as American precision-guided bombs and cruise missiles dismantled the Iraqi army with surgical accuracy. It was the “triumph of silicon over steel”.
This overwhelming display of high-tech military power, built on American semiconductors, was felt profoundly in Moscow. Soviet military leaders, who had long feared America’s technological lead, saw their own inferiority laid bare.
By 1990, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was visiting Stanford, admitting the Cold War was over. As Miller concludes, it was clear who had won, and why:
Silicon Valley had won.
Part V: Integrated Circuits, Integrated World?
The post-Cold War era saw a radical restructuring of the chip industry, driven by one of its original pioneers. After being passed over for the top job at Texas Instruments,
Morris Chang was hired in 1985 by the government of Taiwan to build its semiconductor industry. He came with a revolutionary idea he had pitched years earlier at TI: a “foundry,” a company that would only manufacture chips for other companies, never designing its own. With a blank check from the Taiwanese government, he founded the
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) in 1987.
This “fabless-foundry” model upended the industry. Before TSMC, designing a chip required building a multi-billion dollar fabrication plant, or “fab.” As Jerry Sanders of AMD famously quipped,
“Real men have fabs”. But Morris Chang’s TSMC allowed a new generation of “fabless” companies to emerge, focusing solely on chip design and outsourcing the costly manufacturing to Taiwan. This democratized the industry, leading to an explosion of innovation. Companies like
Nvidia, which started in a Denny’s diner, could design revolutionary graphics processing units (GPUs) without needing billions for a factory.
Qualcomm could focus on designing the complex modem chips that powered the mobile phone revolution, relying on TSMC to make them.
This created what Chang called his “Grand Alliance”. TSMC sat at the center of a vast ecosystem of fabless design firms (mostly American), software tool providers (overwhelmingly American), and equipment makers (American, Japanese, and European). This model, however, had a profound geopolitical consequence. While chip
design was democratized, chip manufacturing became dangerously concentrated. Due to the staggering costs and extreme complexity of building cutting-edge fabs, only a few companies could compete. And TSMC, with its singular focus and massive scale, outcompeted them all. By the 2010s, “Taiwanization” had replaced globalization in advanced chip manufacturing.
The greatest beneficiary of this new model was Apple. After initially relying on Samsung to make the processor for the first iPhone, Steve Jobs invested heavily in creating Apple’s own in-house chip design team.
Today, Apple’s A-series and M-series chips are some of the most powerful in the world, giving its products a significant performance advantage. But Apple, the quintessential fabless company, doesn’t make any of them. The famous text on the back of every iPhone—
“Designed by Apple in California. Assembled in China”—is “highly misleading”. The most irreplaceable part of the process happens in Taiwan. The iPhone’s advanced processors “can only be made in Taiwan” by TSMC.
Part VI: Offshoring Innovation? The Technological Frontier
As the 2010s progressed, Moore’s Law faced its greatest challenge yet. Transistors were becoming so small—measured in a handful of nanometers, smaller than a coronavirus—that the laws of physics were getting in the way.
The existing lithography tools, which used deep ultraviolet (DUV) light, were hitting their physical limits. The industry’s only hope was a radical, hugely expensive, and long-delayed new technology: extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography.
The complexity of an EUV machine is almost beyond comprehension. Miller describes it as “one of the biggest technological gambles of our time”.
It is the most expensive mass-produced machine tool in history, costing well over $100 million each. To generate the EUV light, a powerful laser blasts a tiny droplet of tin 50,000 times per second, turning it into plasma many times hotter than the surface of the sun. Because EUV light is absorbed by almost everything, including air, the entire process must happen in a perfect vacuum, using a series of mirrors so perfectly smooth that if scaled to the size of Germany, their largest bump would be a tenth of a millimeter.
Only one company in the world mastered this technology: the Dutch firm ASML. Its success was a testament to managing a hyper-complex global supply chain. The machine’s key components come from Germany (Zeiss’s optics, Trumpf’s lasers) and the United States (the light source, developed in San Diego). ASML’s rise also marked the final failure of the American lithography industry. Intel had been the primary funder of early EUV research, but when it came time to commercialize the technology, the U.S. government allowed the only remaining American contender to be sold to ASML, effectively ceding control of this critical choke point technology to a European company.
The introduction of EUV technology further consolidated the industry. Building fabs with these machines costs upwards of $20 billion. The number of companies capable of producing leading-edge chips shrank from dozens in the 1990s to just three by the late 2010s:
Intel, Samsung, and TSMC. Then, Intel faltered. After decades of undisputed leadership, the company bungled its transition to new manufacturing processes and delayed its adoption of EUV tools, falling years behind its Asian rivals. This stunning failure meant that by 2020, over 90 percent of the world’s most advanced processors were being manufactured in just one place: Taiwan. The world’s digital infrastructure now rests on a tiny island within easy striking range of the Chinese military.
Parts VII & VIII: China’s Challenge and The Chip Choke
This brings the story to the present-day conflict. Under Xi Jinping, China has recognized its profound strategic vulnerability. For all its tech giants like Alibaba and Tencent, China’s digital world “runs on digits—1s and 0s—that are processed and stored mostly by imported semiconductors”. Every year, China spends more money importing chips than it does importing oil. Xi has declared that this dependence means the “‘vital gate’ of the supply chain is grasped in the hands of others”.
In response, Beijing has launched an all-out assault to build a self-sufficient semiconductor industry, backed by hundreds of billions of dollars in state subsidies via programs like the “Big Fund”. The strategy involves a mix of subsidizing domestic firms like SMIC and YMTC, poaching talent from Taiwan, acquiring foreign companies, and state-sponsored intellectual property theft. The goal of its “Made in China 2025” plan is to drastically reduce its reliance on foreign chips.
The United States, after decades of encouraging trade and integration, has woken up to this challenge. The Trump administration, prodded by national security hawks, concluded that it was impossible for the U.S. to “‘out-innovate’ China and then deny them the fruits of that innovation” if Chinese firms were deeply integrated into the American tech ecosystem. The U.S. began to weaponize China’s dependence on American technology.
The first major salvo was the assault on Huawei. Once on track to dominate the world’s 5G telecom infrastructure, Huawei was also designing world-class smartphone chips fabricated by TSMC.
In May 2020, the U.S. implemented a new rule: any company, anywhere in the world, that uses American software or equipment to produce chips is prohibited from selling them to Huawei without a license. Because it’s impossible to design or manufacture advanced chips without U.S. tools, this rule effectively cut Huawei off from all cutting-edge semiconductors. Its global expansion ground to a halt, its smartphone business was crippled, and China’s 5G rollout was delayed.
The U.S. had successfully leveraged the industry’s choke points to deliver a devastating blow to China’s most important tech company.
This “chip choke” marks a new era. The logic of globalization has been replaced by the logic of national security. The U.S. and China are now locked in a struggle over the future of computing. China is desperately trying to build a domestic supply chain, a task Miller argues would take over a decade and cost “well over a trillion dollars” to achieve.
The U.S. is trying to simultaneously hobble China’s progress while reshoring some of its own manufacturing and strengthening its alliances with other key players like Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, and the Netherlands.
The ultimate flashpoint, Miller concludes, is Taiwan. The island’s dominance of advanced chipmaking makes it both a strategic asset for the West and an irresistible prize for Beijing. A Chinese blockade or invasion of Taiwan would trigger a global economic crisis far exceeding the COVID pandemic, causing the production of everything from iPhones to cars to grind to a halt.
It would be a catastrophe measured in the trillions of dollars. In this sense, the world’s most advanced factories are also its most vulnerable. The peace and stability of the entire global economy depend on the fragile status quo in the Taiwan Strait, a dilemma that sits at the very heart of the 21st-century chip war.
3. Critical Analysis
Chris Miller’s Chip War is a monumental work of synthesis and narrative history. Its brilliance lies not just in the depth of its research but in its ability to weave disparate threads—physics, engineering, business strategy, and high-stakes diplomacy—into a single, coherent, and utterly compelling story.
Evaluation of Content: Miller’s central argument—that semiconductors are the nexus of modern geopolitical power—is not just asserted but proven through a relentless accumulation of historical detail.
He masterfully supports his claims with evidence from a vast range of sources, including declassified government documents, corporate archives, and extensive personal interviews. The book effectively fulfills its purpose by demonstrating, beyond any doubt, how technological advancements in microelectronics have directly shaped major historical outcomes, from the end of the Cold War to the current tensions in the Taiwan Strait.
It contributes meaningfully to multiple fields by providing a new framework for understanding global power, one centered on technology rather than traditional metrics.
While not a philosophy book in the classical sense, its exploration of how a single technology reshapes human society, warfare, and international relations gives it a profound philosophical weight, making it a must-read for anyone contemplating the modern human condition.
Style and Accessibility: For a book on such a complex topic, Chip War is remarkably accessible. Miller possesses a rare talent for explaining difficult technical concepts—from photolithography to FinFET transistors—in clear, analogy-rich language that a layperson can easily grasp. His prose is engaging and fluid, moving seamlessly from the boardroom to the battlefield, from the cleanroom to the cabinet room.
The book is structured chronologically, which helps the reader follow the long and winding history of the industry, and his focus on key individuals (the “great men” of the chip industry) gives the sprawling narrative a human core.
Themes and Relevance: The themes explored in Chip War could not be more relevant. It is a book about globalization and its limits, showing how intricate supply chains can be sources of both efficiency and extreme vulnerability.
It examines the complex relationship between the state and the market, illustrating how government funding and industrial policy have been crucial at every stage of the industry’s development, from the Pentagon’s early investments to China’s current subsidy blitz. Most urgently, it is a book about the weaponization of economic interdependence.
Miller shows how the very networks that were supposed to bind the world together in peaceful commerce have become the battleground for a new kind of war.
Author’s Authority: Chris Miller’s authority on the subject is impeccable. As a trained historian specializing in economics and geopolitics, he has the ideal skill set to tackle this subject. His meticulous research is evident on every page, and his balanced, evidence-based approach lends immense credibility to his analysis.
He avoids both techno-utopianism and simplistic jingoism, offering a nuanced and clear-eyed assessment of a complex global struggle.
4. Strengths and Weaknesses: A Personal Reflection
Reading Chip War was, for me, an eye-opening experience akin to being shown the hidden wiring of the modern world.
Strengths (My Pleasant Experience): What I found most compelling was Miller’s narrative genius. He turns what could have been a dry industrial history into a gripping saga filled with brilliant scientists, ruthless executives, and cunning politicians. The stories of figures like the visionary Bob Noyce, the paranoid Andy Grove, and the strategic Morris Chang are as engaging as any novel.
Furthermore, the book’s central metaphor of chips as the “new oil” is incredibly powerful and, as Miller demonstrates, entirely accurate. My understanding of current events, from supply chain shortages to the tensions over Taiwan, has been fundamentally reshaped by this book.
I was particularly struck by the detailed account of the US-Japan chip war in the 1980s, which serves as a fascinating and cautionary historical parallel to the current conflict with China.
Miller’s ability to explain the staggering complexity of an EUV machine without losing the reader is a triumph of scientific writing.
Weaknesses (My Unpleasant Experience): It is genuinely difficult to find significant weaknesses in Chip War.
If I were to offer a minor critique, it would be that the narrative is overwhelmingly focused on the United States, Japan, the Soviet Union, Taiwan, and China. While this is logical given their central roles, the story of Europe’s semiconductor industry—beyond the crucial role of ASML—is treated more as a side note.
A reader interested in the history of companies like Siemens or Philips might be left wanting more.
Additionally, while the focus on key individuals makes for a great story, one might argue it occasionally veers into a “great man” theory of history, potentially understating the broader structural forces and the contributions of thousands of unsung engineers. However, this is more a stylistic choice than a substantive flaw and does little to detract from the book’s overall power and importance.
5. Reception, Criticism, and Influence
The reception for Chip War has been overwhelmingly positive, bordering on ecstatic. It was widely lauded by critics and appeared on numerous “best of the year” lists. The New York Times called it a “non-fiction thriller,” while The Wall Street Journal praised it as “a riveting history.” As mentioned, it won the 2022 Financial Times Business Book of the Year Award, one of the most prestigious awards for non-fiction.
Its influence has been immediate and profound, particularly in policy circles. The book was published at the precise moment that semiconductor supply chains and the US-China tech competition became front-page news. It has become required reading for officials in the White House, the Pentagon, and on Capitol Hill, providing the essential historical context for contemporary policy debates, such as the CHIPS and Science Act in the United States.
It has framed the public conversation, giving policymakers and the public a shared language and understanding of why these tiny pieces of silicon are so strategically vital.
6. Key Quotations from “Chip War”
“World War II was decided by steel and aluminum, and followed shortly thereafter by the Cold War, which was defined by atomic weapons. The rivalry between the United States and China may well be determined by computing power.”
“Simply stealing a chip didn’t explain how it was made, just as stealing a cake can’t explain how it was baked. The recipe for chips was embedded in the minds of engineers and in the processes of chemical companies and equipment makers. This type of know-how was often not even written down.”
“The text etched onto the back of each iPhone—“Designed by Apple in California. Assembled in China”—is highly misleading. The iPhone’s most irreplaceable components are indeed designed in California and assembled in China. But they can only be made in Taiwan.”
“If Taiwan were to be knocked offline, the total costs would be measured in the trillions. Losing 37 percent of our production of computing power each year could well be more costly than the COVID pandemic and its economically disastrous lockdowns. It would take at least half a decade to rebuild the lost chipmaking capacity.”
“The assault on Huawei was followed by blacklisting of other Chinese tech firms. One was Phytium, a company that the Washington Post revealed was using U.S. technology to design chips for supercomputers that simulated hypersonic missile flight for the Chinese military. Phytium’s chips were designed using U.S. software and produced in Taiwan at TSMC. Access to the semiconductor ecosystem of America and its allies enabled Phytium’s growth.”
7. Comparison with Similar Works
- “The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power” by Daniel Yergin: What Yergin did for oil, Miller does for silicon. Both books take a single critical resource and show how the struggle to control it has shaped modern history and international relations. Chip War is the essential 21st-century successor to The Prize.
- “The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution” by Walter Isaacson: Isaacson’s book tells the story of the digital age through the lens of individual inventors and entrepreneurs. Chip War covers some of the same ground but places the story within a much broader geopolitical framework, focusing more on the strategic competition between nations than on the garage tinkering of geniuses.
- “AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order” by Kai-Fu Lee: Lee’s book focuses specifically on the race for artificial intelligence. Chip War provides the crucial prequel and foundation, explaining that the AI race is fundamentally a race for the specialized computing power that only advanced semiconductors can provide. Miller’s book is broader in scope, covering the entire history and ecosystem of the chip industry, not just its application in AI.
8. Conclusion
In summary, Chris Miller’s Chip War is a landmark achievement. It is a brilliantly researched, compellingly written, and urgently relevant book that fundamentally changes how one sees the world. Its greatest strength is its ability to make the invisible visible—to reveal the microscopic transistors that power our lives and the macroscopic power struggles that define their production.
Miller convincingly demonstrates that our complex, globalized world is far more fragile than we imagine, resting precariously on a supply chain whose most critical links are located on a geopolitical fault line. The book is a stark warning about the dangers of this concentration and the immense stakes of the burgeoning conflict between the United States and China.
I would unreservedly recommend this book to anyone. For the specialist in international affairs or technology, it is an indispensable resource. For the general reader, it is a thrilling and enlightening journey into the secret history of the modern world. In an era of escalating geopolitical tension and rapid technological change, Chip War is not just a history book; it is a survival guide for the 21st century.
