Chip Wars: Why Taiwan is the most important country in the world | Chris Miller

- When I started my research in semiconductors,

I thought that because chips were everywhere,

chips were easy to make.

And because nuclear bombs

were only controlled by a handful of governments,

they were hard to make.

But what I realized is actually the exact opposite.

If you take nuclear weapons,

that technology has barely improved since the 1960s.

It's so easy to make nuclear bombs,

even the North Koreans can do it.

But chips are everywhere

because they're cheap and they're tiny.

And making things very inexpensive and very small

is extraordinarily difficult.

Today, there are just three companies capable of producing

cutting-edge processor chips,

the types of chips that go in phones or computers

or are used for AI.

For many of those devices they rely on chips that,

in some cases, can only be made by one company

in a single factory in Taiwan.

The key risk that hangs over not just the chip industry,

but really our entire economy

is that something goes wrong between China and Taiwan

in the Taiwan Straits,

such that we lose access to chips made in Taiwan.

My name is Chris Miller.

I'm a professor at the Fletcher School

and author of "Chip War:

The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology."

Well, I first got interested in chips

when I realized you really couldn't understand

how the world works without them.

When we think about technology,

we think about social media, we think about search engines,

we think about apps on our phones,

but undergirding all of this are chips.

A chip is a piece of silicon,