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

by Chris Miller

Apple makes precisely none of these chips. It buys most off-the-shelf: memory chips from Japan’s Kioxia, radio frequency chips from California’s Skyworks, audio chips from Cirrus Logic, based in Austin, Texas. Apple designs in-house the ultra-complex processors that run an iPhone’s operating system. But the Cupertino, California, colossus can’t manufacture these chips. Nor can any company in the United States, Europe, Japan, or China. Today, Apple’s most advanced processors—which are arguably the world’s most advanced semiconductors—can only be produced by a single company in a single building, the most expensive factory in human history, which on the morning of August 18, 2020, was only a couple dozen miles off the USS Mustin’s port bow.