As 2025 draws to a close—a year defined by the rise of agentic AI and Nvidia’s stunning ascent as the world’s most valuable company—it is impossible to ignore the quiet engine powering this technological age: the semiconductor chip. No other technology in the last thousand years has transformed human progress with such force and speed. Gordon Moore foresaw this trajectory in 1965, predicting that the number of transistors on a chip would double every two years, driving exponential gains in computing power while shrinking the cost of computation. That prophecy became the backbone of the modern digital economy.

Chris Miller’s Chip War offers the most compelling, accessible, and authoritative narrative yet about how this tiny piece of silicon became the fulcrum of global power. It is a must-read not only for technologists but for anyone in business, policy, or leadership trying to understand why chips—not oil, not data—are the defining resource of the 21st century.

Miller’s storytelling answers a constellation of urgent questions that sit at the intersection of innovation, geopolitics, and national security:

Why does computing power shape global politics and the world economy?
Miller shows how the nations that control chip design, fabrication, and lithography effectively control the future of AI, military capability, and industrial competitiveness.
What drove early physicists and engineers to continually shrink transistors?
He traces the almost obsessive determination inside labs at Fairchild, Intel, AT&T Bell Labs, and elsewhere, where scientific curiosity collided with commercial ambition.
How did Japan, fueled by ambition and U.S. support, challenge—and briefly dominate—the chip industry in the 1980s?
The book unpacks Japan’s meteoric rise and the political tension it triggered in Washington, a storyline now echoing in the U.S.–China rivalry.
Why technology alone is never enough.
Miller illustrates how the semiconductor revolution depended as much on world-class manufacturing discipline, worker culture, bold leadership, and global partnerships as on innovation itself.
How a handful of scientists, engineers, and business visionaries created an industry worth trillions.
It is, at its heart, an entrepreneurial epic.
Why EUV lithography is one of humanity’s most complex machines.
The book captures how ASML—a relatively small Dutch company—built the world’s most advanced tool by enlisting critical U.S. and German expertise. The result is a machine so precise that only one firm on Earth can produce it.
How Taiwan, a small island, became the center of global technology—and a geopolitical flashpoint.
Miller explains how TSMC rose to dominate global chip fabrication and why the world’s most advanced processors depend on a company headquartered 100 miles from mainland China.
What if China attempts to seize Taiwan?
The scenario is dissected with chilling clarity. And Miller argues that Beijing is watching Russia’s costly and stalled war in Ukraine as a cautionary tale—one that complicates any military calculus.
Why the U.S., Europe, and Japan still control the semiconductor supply chain.
Despite China’s vast investments, the “silicon chokepoints”—EUV lithography, EDA tools, high-end semiconductor materials, and advanced design IP—remain firmly in Western and allied hands.

As we enter a world saturated with intelligent devices—cars that drive themselves, factories that self-optimize, phones that act as personal agents—it is tempting to view this progress as inevitable. Chip War reminds us that it is anything but. Our digital lives rest on a supply chain stretched across continents, vulnerable to political miscalculations, economic nationalism, and the possibility of conflict in the Taiwan Strait.

The United States currently retains strategic advantage through control of chip tools and architecture. China remains the formidable challenger, pouring billions into domestic manufacturing as it races to end its reliance on Western technology. Whether this escalating “cold war” stabilizes or spirals is one of the defining questions of our time.

Chris Miller has written an adventure story disguised as a geopolitical analysis—clear, engrossing, and profoundly important. If you want to understand the forces shaping the future of AI, global power, and the world economy, Chip War is essential reading.

Go read it. It may be the most consequential story of the century. https://www.amazon.in/CHIP-WAR-PA-Chris-Miller/dp/1398504122/