Financial Times Business Book of the Year
An Economist Best Book of the Year
A Foreign Affairs Best Book of the Year
New York Times Bestseller
#1 on Fortune’s Spring CEO Survey of the Best Book They’ve Read in the Past Year
Winner 2023 PROSE Award for Outstanding Work by a Trade Publisher
Winner of the Arthur Ross Book Award
Shortlisted for the Lionel Gelber Prize
“Pulse quickening…Chip War makes a whale of a case: that the chip industry now determines both the structure of the global economy and the balance of geopolitical power. But the book is not a polemic. Rather, it’s a nonfiction thriller — equal parts “The China Syndrome” and “Mission Impossible”….If any book can make general audiences grok the silicon age — and finally recognize how it rivals the atomic age for drama and import — Chip War is it.”
—New York Times
Description
One of Barack Obama’s Favorite Books of 2023
The Financial Times Business Book of the Year, this epic account of the decades-long battle to control one of the world’s most critical resources—microchip technology—with the United States and China increasingly in fierce competition is “pulse quickening…a nonfiction thriller” (The New York Times).
You may be surprised to learn that microchips are the new oil—the scarce resource on which the modern world depends. Today, military, economic, and geopolitical power are built on a foundation of computer chips. Virtually everything—from missiles to microwaves—runs on chips, including cars, smartphones, the stock market, even the electric grid. Until recently, America designed and built the fastest chips and maintained its lead as the #1 superpower, but America’s edge is in danger of slipping, undermined by players in Taiwan, Korea, and Europe taking over manufacturing. Now, as Chip War reveals, China, which spends more on chips than any other product, is pouring billions into a chip-building initiative to catch up to the US. At stake is America’s military superiority and economic prosperity.
Economic historian Chris Miller explains how the semiconductor came to play a critical role in modern life and how the US became dominant in chip design and manufacturing and applied this technology to military systems. America’s victory in the Cold War and its global military dominance stems from its ability to harness computing power more effectively than any other power. Until recently, China had been catching up, aligning its chip-building ambitions with military modernization.
Illuminating, timely, and fascinating, Chip War is “an essential and engrossing landmark study" (London Times).
Reviews
“A riveting history of the semiconductor by Chris Miller, a historian at Tufts University…His volume could not be better timed…[features] vivid accounts [and] colorful characters.”
—Financial Times
“In Chip War, his elegant new book, Chris Miller of Tufts University shows how economic, geopolitical and technological forces shaped this essential industry… For those seeking to understand it better, Chip War is a fine place to start.”
—The Economist
“Fascinating…A historian by training, Miller walks the reader through decades of semiconductor history – a subject that comes to life thanks to [his] use of colorful anecdotes…Chip War makes clear that the battle for the multi-billion-dollar struggle for semiconductor supremacy in an increasingly-digitized world will only intensify in the years to come.”
—Forbes