Chip War

Miller, a historian, tells the seventy-year story of how semiconductors became the oil of the digital age, and how their manufacturing concentrated so extremely that a single company (TSMC), on a single island (Taiwan), fabricates the vast majority of the world's most advanced chips, using lithography machines only one Dutch firm (ASML) can build. It won the Financial Times Business Book of the Year for good reason: it explains the physical substrate of the entire AI economy.

The book reads like geopolitical thriller more than textbook: Soviet copy-cat programs that doomed their industry, Japan's 1980s memory-chip dominance and its unwinding, Andy Grove's paranoia at Intel, and China's multi-hundred-billion-dollar campaign to break its dependence. Every export-control headline and fab-subsidy program of recent years follows the logic Miller lays out.

For investors, Chip War is the context layer beneath every AI trade. Why Nvidia's market cap did what it did, why governments subsidize fabs like aircraft carriers, why 'Taiwan risk' is priced into everything, the book turns those from headlines into a coherent map. It stops in 2022; the AI-boom years since have only amplified its argument.