Narrator: In August 2020, the American destroyer USS Mustin sailed through the narrow strait separating Taiwan from mainland China. It was a routine display of military presence, a message to Beijing. But at the exact same time, a far more consequential maneuver was underway. The U.S. government was finalizing rules that would cut off Huawei, China’s technology champion, from the global supply of advanced computer chips. This act of “technological asphyxiation” crippled one of the world’s most powerful companies without firing a single shot. It revealed a new reality: the 21st-century rivalry between nations would not be determined by steel or even atomic weapons, but by computing power.

In his book Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology, historian Chris Miller provides a gripping narrative of the decades-long battle for control over this foundational technology. He argues that microchips—the tiny slivers of silicon that power everything from iPhones to F-35 fighter jets—have become the new oil, the critical resource over which the future of global power will be decided.

Narrator: The story of the semiconductor begins not in a corporate boardroom, but in the laboratories of Cold War America. The invention of the transistor at Bell Labs in 1947, followed by the integrated circuit by Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments and Robert Noyce at Fairchild Semiconductor, were monumental scientific achievements. However, these early chips were expensive and had no obvious commercial market. It was the existential threat of the Soviet Union that created the industry’s first, and most crucial, customer.

This is best seen in the story of the Apollo Guidance Computer. In the early 1960s, NASA faced an impossible task: building a computer small, light, and powerful enough to guide astronauts to the moon. Existing computers were room-sized behemoths. The only viable option was to bet on Fairchild’s new, unproven integrated circuits. It was a massive gamble. NASA became the first large-scale buyer of chips, purchasing over a million of them. This single government program validated the technology, proved its reliability, and, by creating volume, drove the price of a single chip from over $1,000 to just a few dollars. At the same time, the U.S. Air Force was using chips to guide its Minuteman II intercontinental ballistic missiles. This military and space-race spending didn't just fund the industry; it forged it, establishing an early and enduring American dominance.

Narrator: By the 1980s, American leadership was under assault. The challenge came from Japan, an ally the U.S. had helped rebuild. Japanese companies, having licensed American technology, had perfected the art of manufacturing. They focused on a specific type of chip—DRAM, or memory chips—and began producing them with a quality and efficiency that American firms couldn't match.

The wake-up call came in 1980. At an industry conference, a Hewlett-Packard executive named Richard Anderson presented a devastating report. His team had tested chips from both American and Japanese suppliers. The results were shocking: the best American chips failed six times more often than the worst Japanese ones. The news sent a wave of panic through Silicon Valley. Executives like AMD’s Jerry Sanders declared that the U.S. was in an “economic war with Japan.” Accusations flew, including a high-profile FBI sting that caught Hitachi employees trying to buy trade secrets from IBM. American chipmakers, once staunch free-marketeers, banded together to form the Semiconductor Industry Association and began lobbying Washington for protection, arguing that Japan’s success was built on an unfair system of government subsidies and protected markets.

Narrator: Faced with the Japanese onslaught in the memory market, the American industry was forced to adapt or die. The most pivotal shift came from within Intel. By the mid-1980s, the company that had invented the DRAM chip was losing hundreds of millions of dollars competing with Japan. In a now-legendary conversation, then-president Andy Grove asked chairman Gordon Moore, "If we got kicked out and the board brought in a new CEO, what do you think he would do?" Moore replied, "He would get us out of memories." Grove’s stark conclusion was, "Why shouldn't you and I walk out the door, come back in, and do it ourselves?"

Intel did just that. It exited the memory business and bet its entire future on microprocessors. This strategic pivot, combined with its partnership with Microsoft, created the "Wintel" monopoly that powered the personal computer revolution for decades. This move reflected a broader trend in the U.S. industry: a shift away from capital-intensive manufacturing and toward the high-value, high-profit work of chip design. America was ceding the factory floor to focus on the blueprint.

Narrator: The American pivot to design created a new problem: who would actually build the chips? The answer came from an industry veteran named Morris Chang. After a long career at Texas Instruments, Chang was recruited by the Taiwanese government to build its chip industry. He proposed a radical new business model: a "pure-play foundry." His company, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), would never design its own chips. It would only manufacture chips for other companies, acting as a neutral factory for hire.

This model was revolutionary. It enabled the "fabless revolution," allowing brilliant designers to start companies like Nvidia and Qualcomm without needing billions of dollars to build a fabrication plant, or "fab." They could focus on designing world-class chips and let TSMC handle the complex, costly manufacturing. The result was an explosion of innovation. However, it also had a profound geopolitical consequence. The economics of chipmaking favor immense scale, and TSMC executed its strategy flawlessly. Today, 90% of the world's most advanced logic chips—the brains of iPhones, AI data centers, and advanced weapons—are manufactured by TSMC in Taiwan, an island that China considers a rogue province.

Narrator: For decades, China was a laggard in the chip industry, set back by the chaos of the Cultural Revolution and a state-run system that stifled innovation. It became the world’s largest assembler of electronics but remained critically dependent on foreign chips, spending more on importing semiconductors than on oil. Recognizing this as a fatal vulnerability, President Xi Jinping launched an unprecedented national effort, backed by hundreds of billions of dollars, to achieve semiconductor independence under the "Made in China 2025" plan.

This ambition set China on a direct collision course with the United States. The new nature of this conflict was made clear with the assault on Huawei. The U.S. government, realizing that nearly every advanced chip in the world was made with American tools or software, weaponized this dependence. It placed Huawei on an "Entity List," effectively banning any company using American technology from selling chips to them. The move devastated Huawei’s smartphone business and sent a clear message: the U.S. was willing to use its control over the semiconductor supply chain as a tool of statecraft. The Chip War had officially begun.

Narrator: The single most important takeaway from Chip War is that the globalized semiconductor supply chain, long celebrated as a marvel of free-market efficiency, has now become the central battleground for geopolitical supremacy. The book reveals that a nation's power is no longer just measured in armies and economies, but in its ability to design and produce the most advanced microchips. Control over the chokepoints in this supply chain—from design software to manufacturing equipment to the fabs themselves—is the new strategic high ground.

Chris Miller’s work leaves us with a deeply unsettling question. The modern world, with its incredible technological progress and interconnected economy, was built on these fragile, globe-spanning supply chains. Now, as great power competition intensifies, can this system built for efficiency survive the immense pressures of national security and geopolitical rivalry? Or is the world on the brink of a great technological decoupling, one that will reshape the global balance of power for decades to come?