Get to work! New non-fiction books: The battle for computer chips determines our future

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This year the headlines are: “China feigns an invasion of Taiwan with maneuvers” (April 4 in NZZ); “China sends fighter jets across Taiwan border again” (July 4 in Handelszeitung); “Taiwan: Dozens of Chinese fighter jets off the coast” (in view September 14). The big one wants to destroy the little one – what Russia is doing in Ukraine, China wants to repeat in Taiwan. But what do we care about the Far East, since the Russian attack is taking place in Europe.

However, Taiwan is closer than we think – in every one of our smartphones. “Producing ever-smaller computer chips remains the greatest technical challenge of our time,” writes American Chris Miller in his best-selling book, recently published in German. “Currently, there is no company that produces chips with greater precision than Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, better known as TSMC.” In 2020, TSMC created a chip half the size of the coronavirus.

“War of the Chips” is how Miller militantly calls his book. A professor of international history at Tufts University in Massachusetts writes emphatically: “The outcome of World War II was decided by access to steel and aluminum.” The Cold War soon followed, in which superiority over nuclear weapons was determined. “The rivalry between the US and China may now be decided over computing power.”

The United States, the inventors of chip technology, has not always had to deal with China as an adversary. Miller tells the story from the development of the first semiconductor in 1945 to the present as a crime story with changing fronts: first the Soviets appear on the scene in the 1960s (“Copy that!”), then the Japanese in the 1980s, who are much more aggressive (“At War with Japan”) and, finally, since 2014, the Chinese (“Call for Attack”).

Miller shows that the US largely created its own problems. On the one hand, Morris Chang (92) was fired as CEO of Texas Instruments, after which he founded TSMC in 1987, not all places on the doorstep of China. On the other hand, US companies such as Microsoft and Apple have moved straight to China and outsourced their chip production there – a development that the Trump and Biden US governments want to reverse.

But China has long since acquired a taste for it. “No other country exploits the digital world as effectively for authoritarian purposes as China,” Miller writes. “It would be naive to assume that what happened in Ukraine cannot happen in East Asia.” Given the importance of chips in this war, Chinese government analysts have already called for a takeover of TSMC if tensions between the US and China escalate.

Source: Blick