Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology by Chris Miller
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This is a phenomenal book on the history, technology, supply chain, geo-politics, economics, and company dominance of chips. As someone who is interested in policy for AI safety, this was a must-read. I have no complaints about the book, and since the industry moves so fast, it helps that this book was written recently in 2022 (this comment probably wont age well lol).
Some take aways from the book: Chips are in literally everything and are crucial for warfare. As time goes on only more compute will be demanded as more tech is produced, it becomes more ubiquitous in everyday items, more data is demanded, and compute-intensive AI grows in popularity. There are only a few highly specialized companies that operate at each level in the supply chain for chips and the COVID pandemic showed us how brittle this supply chain can be and how a break in this supply chain can lead to backups in everything from cars and planes to dishwashers. Weaponized interdependence between countries and companies manufacturing semi-conductors can be a force for good or bad and there are many levers for countries to pull in order to gain an advantage. A prime example of this is TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) which produces 90% of the world’s high-tech chips. If the fabs were to be destroyed (either via war or natural disaster) or if China were to take over Taiwan, global power may shift dramatically. Another would be ASML in the Netherlands which supplies 90% of the photolithography market and 100% of the advanced photolithographic market. Copying and stealing this technology may be quite difficult as the knowledge is incredibly specific, the designs are impossibly complex, they require incredible precision to avoid failure, and the resources to build the machines are hard to source.
Note: Listened to as an audiobook, I don’t believe there was any lost information in doing so.