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

by Chris Miller

The United States still has a stranglehold on the silicon chips that gave Silicon Valley its name, though its position has weakened

China now spends more money each year importing chips than it spends on oil.

China is devoting its best minds and billions of dollars to developing its own semiconductor technology in a bid to free itself from America’s chip choke. If Beijing succeeds, it will remake the global economy and reset the balance of military power. 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.

Around a quarter of the chip industry’s revenue comes from phones;

Today, no firm fabricates chips with more precision than the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, better known as TSMC.

Fairchild cofounder Gordon Moore noticed in 1965 that the number of components that could be fit on each chip was doubling annually

the computing power of chips would grow exponentially—came to be called “Moore’s Law”

Chips from Taiwan provide 37 percent of the world’s new computing power each year.

Two Korean companies produce 44 percent of the world’s memory chips. The Dutch company ASML builds 100 percent of the world’s extreme ultraviolet lithography machines, without which cutting-edge chips are simply impossible to make. OPEC’s 40 percent share of world oil production looks unimpressive by comparison.

Germany, though, only 20 percent of American bombs fell within one thousand feet of their target.