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

by Chris Miller

The PC market was stagnant, because it seemed nearly everyone already had a PC, but it remained remarkably profitable for Intel, providing billions of dollars a year that could be reinvested into R&D. The company spent over $10 billion a year on R&D throughout the 2010s, four times as much as TSMC and three times more than the entire budget of DARPA. Only a couple of companies in the world spent more. As the chip industry entered the EUV era, Intel looked poised to dominate. The company had been crucial to EUV’s emergence, thanks to Andy Grove’s initial $200 million bet on the technology in the early 1990s. Now, after billions of dollars of investment—a substantial portion of which had come from Intel—ASML had finally made the technology a reality. Yet rather than capitalizing on this new era of shrinking transistors, Intel squandered its lead, missing major shifts in semiconductor architecture needed for artificial intelligence, then bungling its manufacturing processes and failing to keep up with Moore’s Law.