Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology

"Another prize that is well worth keeping an eye on is the Financial Times book prize . In principle, it’s a business book prize, but in practice, it covers any book that might be relevant to business or economics. This prize is a good way of getting acquainted with issues that are often really important for the functioning of the world economy and hence our everyday lives, written in a way that’s accessible to the general reader. This year’s winner was Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology by Chris Miller , a professor at the Fletcher School at Tufts University. Last year’s winner was This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race by Nicole Perlroth, which highlighted another issue we all need to be aware of, but many of us choose to ignore. December 4, 2022. Updated: March 18, 2025 Five Books aims to keep its book recommendations and interviews up to date. If you are the interviewee and would like to update your choice of books (or even just what you say about them) please email us at [email protected] Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you've enjoyed this interview, please support us by donating a small amount ."

"Again, it’s a vast work of research and history that’s also highly topical. Even today, just before we were talking, I was looking at the latest skirmishes in the chip wars, with Chinese chip makers being deprived of access to the tool manufacturers that they need in order to make their semiconductors. Shortages of semiconductors have been a big issue in the news over the past couple of years. Another is concerns in the EU, US and the UK about having a native supply of semiconductors and not being over reliant on Taiwan , where Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), one of the biggest chip makers in the world, is mainly based. That’s where 92% of the world’s semiconductors are sourced. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . So there’s a great topicality to this book, but it’s also about how this happened, the genesis of TSMC. It was built by a Chinese émigré who was called back to Taiwan to help build their chip business and did so, just at the moment when the rest of the world was sitting on its hands and not doing enough. I’ve written about UK chip policy—such as it is—and a lot of people use that old joke, ‘I wouldn’t start from here! If you wanted to invest, it should have been 20 years ago.’ That is when TSMC came to the fore. Chris Miller unpicks that story and examines not just the history but also the implications of this global dependency, which clearly, in the light of the chip shortages and fears about Taiwan and China, has become increasingly pressing as an industrial policy issue. Yes, the most important company you haven’t ever heard of and its role in this complex supply chain. Once you start to get into it, and Chris Miller does, you begin to realize just how many things are dependent on this particular industry. What I like about the book is the way in which it marries government policy, how can you nudge into existence something so important, the balance of foresight, money and entrepreneurial skill. Again, it’s an important book about business, showing how it can become a vital part of the geopolitics as well as an economic driver. The story today is about sanctions on the supply of semiconductor machine tools to China. But, as I discovered when I was writing about it—which the book also makes clear—the supply chain for these chips is very complex. It includes mined raw materials, many of which come from China. It’s all interwoven. In a way, any war over semiconductors ends up with everybody losing. There are plenty of entrepreneurs that I’ve spoken to who are pretty clear that we’ll all be losers if this devolves into ‘Let’s all try to be independent makers of semiconductors’ because nobody—not even the Taiwanese—has got everything in place. They need parts or tools or raw materials from other trading partners. So if globalization breaks down, we’re back to Gary Gerstle. We’ll end up with a problem we’ll all be affected by, not to be too gloomy about it. We’ll talk about the gloomiest book next."

"Microchips are one of the hottest economic topics of 2022. A chip shortage was part of the inflation picture over the last year and a half. Microchips are among the biggest economic flashpoints between the United States and China. Continued progress in microchips is central to American economic growth. Chris Miller tells us the history of how microchips were developed, emphasizing the critical role of the government, and especially defense procurement. He gives us a description of how microchips became the single most complex global good, with different pieces and aspects of the technology located in the Netherlands, the United States, Japan, Korea, and especially and most importantly, Taiwan. And he gives us a discussion of the risks that a literal war in Taiwan or an economic war of the type that we are seeing the beginning of could pose for this incredibly important, complex and globalized technology. Humans are always the most important driver of economic growth, and they were an important part of the story in every one of the five books that I recommended. There is almost no limit to the study that can be done to try to understand the human aspects of economic growth. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter In 2023, the spotlight will grow on the levelling-off and potential reduction of globalization that we’re going through. This will be a big issue going forward. Fifteen years ago, there was a whole raft of books about globalization. We might start to want to read or research and write about de-globalization, as we might be in the beginning of that process. And finally, the rehabilitation of industrial policy is an area of increasing importance. ‘Industrial policy’ used to be an insult levied against ill-conceived government plans; now, governments around the world are increasingly comfortable getting directly involved in industry. I’m not sure if that is a good thing or a bad thing, but it is one of the many things worth reading about in 2023. Part of our best books of 2022 series."