Why this book
Chris Miller's argument is that the twentieth-century contest for oil has been replaced by a twenty-first-century contest for the tiny silicon chips that run everything from missiles to smartphones to the stock market. Tracing the industry from the transistor's 1947 invention at Bell Labs through Cold War military competition, Japan's 1980s manufacturing surge, and the rise of Taiwan, Miller shows how the United States built and, for decades, defended a commanding lead in both designing and building the world's most advanced chips — a lead that quietly became the foundation of American military dominance, since precision-guided weapons and modern computing power both depend on cutting-edge semiconductors.
The book's sharpest and most consequential claim is about concentration: rather than chips being made everywhere by everyone, the industry has narrowed to a small number of irreplaceable choke points — above all Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, which makes the large majority of the world's most advanced logic chips, and the Dutch firm ASML, the sole global source of the extreme ultraviolet lithography machines needed to make them. Miller's central figure is Morris Chang, the Texas Instruments veteran who returned to Taiwan in the late 1980s to found TSMC on a then-unproven idea: a company that manufactures chips designed by other firms rather than designing its own. That single business-model bet reshaped the entire global industry and left Taiwan, ninety miles from mainland China, holding a strategic asset the whole world now depends on. Critics have noted the book, finished just before major 2022 U.S. export controls took effect, offers less analysis of government policy and more of entrepreneurs and engineers — a real gap given how central state action is to the story going forward.
Who should read it
Anyone trying to understand why Taiwan matters so disproportionately to global security, or why 'chips' dominate headlines about US-China tension, will find this the clearest available account, written accessibly for non-engineers. It will frustrate readers wanting deep analysis of the actual U.S. and Chinese government policy responses — Miller himself has acknowledged the book says comparatively little about what officials in Washington were doing or not doing across the decades this concentration built up.
About the author
Chris Miller is an economic historian, associate professor of international history at Tufts University's Fletcher School, and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Chip War was named the Financial Times Business Book of the Year in 2022.