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

When we think about technology, we think of social media, search engines, apps on our phone; but undergirding all of this are chips.”

What if the world's most critical technology isn't software, but the tiny pieces of silicon that power it? In an age where chips are everywhere, from smartphones to coffee makers, their manufacturing complexity might surprise you. It's harder to make a modern semiconductor than a nuclear weapon.

Inside Taiwan's cutting-edge fabrication plants, machines worth $350 million each orchestrate an atomic ballet. These marvels of engineering use the flattest mirrors ever made and lasers that create temperatures 40 times hotter than the sun's surface – all to carve transistors smaller than a coronavirus.

From Silicon Valley to Taiwan, from the Netherlands to Japan, making modern chips is a global dance of unprecedented complexity. Each processor requires ultra-purified materials, billion-dollar machines, and a supply chain spanning multiple continents. But this intricate network faces its greatest challenge yet.

As artificial intelligence reshapes our world, the demand for advanced chips is skyrocketing. Tech giants are pouring billions into new semiconductor designs, while startups race to create specialized AI chips that could make artificial intelligence as accessible as a Google search. Join us as we explore how these tiny silicon marvels are shaping humanity's future.

Timestamps:
0:00: The Freethink Interview: Chris Miller
0:39: A single factory in Taiwan
2:31: The first transistor
3:31: The first chip
4:50: Moore’s Law
7:40: A global industry
10:01: The most important company in the world
12:08: Why chips are central to US and China
13:45: AI and chips

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Read more of our stories on future technology:
Inventions that are fighting the rise of facial recognition technology
The technology we (or aliens) need for long-distance interstellar travel
3 emerging technologies that will give renewable energy storage a boost
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Watch our original series:

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About Freethink
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[SargonofQueens]

Most people think Taiwan is only manufacturing Chips designed by other countries. In fact out of the top ten chip design companies, 4 are Taiwanese companies and one is owned by a Taiwanese dual citizen (Nvidia) and another one has a Taiwanese CEO (AMD).

[LiiwoVusam]

Look at those comments in English from the Chinese, this is why they are seen as enemies of the Taiwanese.

[RobertTung-wlww]

Taiwan is a small island living with free loving human. It needs your support to keep it free from China.

[DiegoL]

TSMC has an ecosystem that supports the chip-making business in Taiwan. There are many local companies assisting TSMC in Taiwan that you cannot find them in other countries. TSMC's CoWoS (Chip-on-Wafer-on-Substrate) is high-density advanced packaging technology second to none in order to make the high density AI chip possible. It took many years of effort and it is not something can be copied easily by other countries.

[mikkel.bak.jensen]

Thank you for this video. It gives a good insight into the importance of chips in our everyday lives and the policy we are making.

[Victor-cghx]

We call TSMC as the mountain that protect our country.

[stachowi]

I read Chip War and this video is an amazing (well produced) companion to the book.

[akivd]

Dutch company is ASML. Creates EUV machines costing around $400 million.

[yukee]

Thanks Dr. Chris for the elaboration!
Also thanks Netherlands company-ASML for the machine for TSMC to produce chips.

[eileenchang]

I love the title “the most important country”.

[Jason-nqkv]

Taiwan started making chips very early. And also they are very good quality!😌I am pound that I am Taiwanese😊

[u]

Ironically SMIC in China was also founded byTaiwanese. It's current CEO Mong-Song Liang is also a Taiwanese, a former engineer from TSMC.

[danh]

And one of the leading chip design ARM were designed by two scrappy brits. Without their breakthroughs it may have not been possible to have low power chips on handheld devices at all, as it was a sheer fluke that they discovered it was low power!

[l-_-lForkBombl-_-l]

"RISC Architecture is gonna Change Everything"

[gracechen]

Excellent video, full of insights! Go! Taiwan Go!

[nicolasdujarrier]

Extremely interesting video of the timeline and benefits of semiconductor manufacturing 👍👍👍 !!!

My personal belief is that the current state of technology, the huge AI investment are extremely inefficient.

It is soooo obvious to me that what is first needded is to scale-up the manufacturing of spintronics related technologies like Non-Volatile-Memory (NVM) MRAM : it is a key piece needed to enable really efficient (at least 1000x better effeciency) compare to current technologies (volatile DRAM, …) and with time, enable new paradigms…

[Darth_Insidious]

He who controls the chips, controls the universe.

[michaelwang]

2:22 Computer had to be deBUG... never though it literally meant De-Bugged until now. 🤣

[Atom-rg]

The last part is important. “Exponential” is a term humans have difficulties understanding what it ACTUALLY means. Most think it’s like multiplication. They don’t realize that it’s doubling every time. Even the words don’t make sense when you read it like that.

[hopree]

So u meant to say tribulation is coming... That's great to hear