***Winner of the Financial Times Business
Book of the Year award***
UPDATED EDITION WITH A NEW AFTERWORD
'Pulse quickening. A nonfiction thriller - equal parts The China
Syndrome and Mission Impossible' New York
Times
An epic account of the decades-long battle to control the world's most critical
resource―microchip technology
Power in the modern world - military, economic, geopolitical - is built on a
foundation of computer chips. America has maintained its lead as a superpower
because it has dominated advances in computer chips and all the technology that
chips have enabled. (Virtually everything runs on chips: cars,
phones, the stock market, even the electric grid.) Now that edge is in danger
of slipping, undermined by the naïve assumption that globalising the chip
industry and letting players in Taiwan, Korea and Europe take over
manufacturing serves America's interests. Currently, as Chip War reveals,
China, which spends more on chips than any other product, is pouring billions
into a chip-building Manhattan Project to catch up to the US.
In Chip War economic historian Chris Miller recounts the
fascinating sequence of events that led to the United States perfecting chip
design, and how faster chips helped defeat the Soviet Union (by rendering the
Russians’ arsenal of precision-guided weapons obsolete). The battle to control
this industry will shape our future. China spends more money importing
chips than buying oil, and they are China's greatest external vulnerability as
they are fundamentally reliant on foreign chips. But with 37 per cent of the
global supply of chips being made in Taiwan, within easy range of Chinese
missiles, the West's fear is that a solution may be close at hand.
About the Author
Chris Miller is Assistant Professor of International History
at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. He also serves
as Eurasia Director at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, a think tank in
Philadelphia, and as a Director at Greenmantle, a New York and London-based
macroeconomic and geopolitical consultancy. He is the author of three previous
books, and he frequently writes for the New York Times, Wall Street
Journal and other outlets. He received a PhD in history from Yale University
and an AB in history from Harvard University. Currently, he resides in
Cambridge, MA.