Chip War

I care about semiconductor chips. I’ve chosen this line of work & been a part of it for over 11 years now & have no regrets over it. From an engineering standpoint, designing and manufacturing chips is an utterly fascinating, complex interplay of software and hardware - a revelation made abundantly clear & accessible to non-nerds through extensive research & attention to detail in the subject of this review. Chip War by Chris Miller, which attempts to consolidate the complete evolutionary journey of modern semiconductors from the late 50s up to the present day, is therefore essential reading for me and my tribe. What widens the appeal of the book, however, is the author’s ability to weave in geopolitics alongside semiconductor evolution. This book sheds light on the diverse, historical ways in which America and other nations bound to it, have come to see themselves and each other. If you’ve ever been intrigued by silicon valley prophet Steve Jobs, for example, you get to learn in this book how several decades prior, the great founder of the Japanese tech-giant Sony, Akio Morita, pioneered the former’s emulated penchant for meaningful & impactful product innovation. Another Asian behemoth featured in the book who you’ve probably never heard of, but ought to acquaint yourself with, is Morris Chang, the father of the Taiwanese Super-Fab, TSMC. Chang is author Chris Miller’s self-professed favorite character of the book & he gives us a historical account of Chang’s various towering achievements starting at the age of 54 when he was passed over for the top job at Texas Instruments. Both Morita & Chang are perfect, albeit rare, case studies in how Asia can & has outpaced America’s self-perceived exclusivity in technological advancement, by leveraging the opportunity of starting alongside the western power on a level playing field, a happenstance America has repeatedly & rather successfully managed to keep scarce.

WHILE rich in well-researched facts, the book struggles with unwieldy chapter naming & organization exacerbated by elusive narrative cohesion - China’s cultural revolution, Russia’s descent from space dominance to a failed silicon valley replica, misadventures of the Vietnam war, Apple’s tech industry dominance, are some of the featured narrratives. Only one key theme stands tall above all else - America’s consistent, insatiable & questionable pursuit of permanent world dominance as a unipolar geopolity. The most interesting chip industry stalwarts covered in the book - Akio Morita & Morris Chang - elicit that interest simply because they succeeded in creating effective counterbalances to America’s obsessive belligerence. Present day American concerns over Taiwan’s geopolitically fragile monopoly over chip manufacturing, which are detailed extensively in the book, seem legitimate until one realizes the primary role of America’s own chip design capitalists in creating it. In fact, the very concept of a monopoly seemed to serve Europe, & later America, fully well on the upside of their respective colony-fueled renaissances starting from the 15th century. China & the semiconductor-palpitations it’s causing America in recent years is another key theme. The contrast between Asia & the US when it comes to government-industry collaboration couldn’t be starker when seen holistically starting from the late 50s. Japan and South Korea (& China to a much smaller extent), have governments that enabled private industry with deep pockets only on what was asked and then got out of the way, whereas in the US the relationship was flip-flop in nature right from the start, where each side tends to dominate & dictate terms in a unipolar manner. China has been building military capability by mostly buying America-designed chips off the shelf as opposed to the US govt that’s paranoid about controlling the chip design flow & roadmap of private firms for its own intentions.

THE US government’s insecurity starting from the 2010s stems from the fact, documented well in the book, that for most American chip firms and tech firms, China is a more important customer than their own government. While the American auto sector saw the biggest impact of chip shortages in 2020-2021, that was more to do with their own failure to forecast demand dynamics. At the onset of COVID, they cut their chip consumption forecasts, which ostensibly led chipmakers to supplant that demand with PC consumer demand, which went up. When the auto industry saw a sudden need to ramp chip consumption back up, the supply couldn’t catch up on short notice. While the existence of domestic manufacturers could prevent such future occurrences, Biden’s America seems to be applying that as a thin layer of impetus over pre-existing biases. For the US government, the only way to exist seems to be presiding over unipolar geopolity. The US’s recent assault on Huawei for example is implied in the book as a necessity to prevent China’s opaque, in-denial, dictatorship from spying on America using network equipment, even though the US itself did exactly that as leaked by Edward Snowden in 2013. America seems to dubiously equate technological independence to unipolar dominance. Even the latest fear over China’s war-like posturing over Taiwan can be amortized through the realization that America’s own past record of warmongering likely exceeds any clandestine designs China might have for Taiwan. The book does a stellar job of explaining why everyone should care about semiconductor chips but more prominently lays bare the paranoia and superiority complex of America, both of which have seemingly put the nation in an echo chamber, a stubbornly self-serving, infinite hall of mirrors, that has frozen in itself a reflection of the country’s fleeting unipolar reality of the 90s.