Episode Transcript
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Welcometo the Investor Download, the podcast
about the themes driving markets andthe economy now and in the future.
I'm your host, David Brett.
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From tariffs to trade Wars to the ChipsAct, the battle for technology
is only just heating up.
The chip war is, I think, ongoing.
That's Chris Miller, author and winner ofthe 2022 FT business Book
of the Year, Chip War.
Both in its initial iteration as aconflict between governments to deploy
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chips to strategic applications,but also between companies is to try to
race to build bigger and betterAI-capable data centres.
In this show, we discuss the current stateof the battle for one of the world's most
prized commodities, chips,and where that battle might lead us.
But in the first part of theshow, a short history of chips.
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Chris Miller is an assistant professor ofinternational history at the Fletcher
School of Law and Diplomacyat Tufts University.
He has a speciality in Soviet Unionhistory and writes frequently for
publications such as the New York Times.
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So what made him write about chips?
Well, I got interested in computing and inchips by looking at the history of the
Cold War when the Soviet Union and theUnited States were pouring money into
developing more advanced weapon systems,missiles that could guide themselves.
I realised that at the core of the ColdWar arms race was a computing arms race
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that depended on better and better chips.
It wasn't just the Cold War arms race thataccelerated demand for
technology and chips.
At the same time, the Soviet Union and theUS were in a race for space,
which wasn't just about who couldbe the first to land on the Moon.
No single space project in this periodwill be more impressive to mankind or more
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important for the long-rangeexploration of space.
It was, of course, aboutfinancial and political might.
We go into space because whatever mankindmust undertake, free men must fully share.
But it was also abouttechnological innovation.
We propose to accelerate to accelerate thedevelopment of the
appropriate lunar spacecraft.
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We propose to develop alternateliquid and solid fuel boosters.
Joysticks, used in the Apollo Luna Rover,became a staple for
video game controllers.
That's one small All steps for man.
Confirmation of some aspectsof Einstein's theory of relativity during
these missions facilitated thecreation of accurate GPS systems.
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One giant leap for man.
But back to chips.
The Apollo guidance computer wasone of the first to use microchips.
The first chips that were invented wereessentially used in guiding
either spacecraft or missiles.
There's been a long historyof advances, both technological advances,
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but also manufacturing process advancesthat were either directly funded by the US
military or devised foruse in defense department programs.
Before we dive deeper into chips and thechip war, before chips came transistors.
Well, before chips, computers relied onindividual transistors, little switches
that flip on and off and produce the onesand zeros that undergird all
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software, most data storage.
But they were flimsyand would break easily.
In the late In the late 1950s, a number ofresearchers realized that if you put
multiple transistors on the same block ofsemiconductor material, a
piece of gallium or silicon,you could simultaneously make them smaller
and also make them much,much more reliable.
And that was the basic intuitionthat drove the first chips.
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And we've essentially been improving onthese blocks of silicon
with transistors carved into them from thelate '50s all the way up to the present.
And advances have improved exponentially.
Moore's Law, named after Gordon Moore, oneof the co-founders of Intel,
states that the number of transistors onan integrated circuit chip doubles
approximately every two years.
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And amazingly, that law hasheld true right up to now.
From four transistors on a chip back inthe '60s, there's now around 12
billion on an iPhone 12 chip.
And that's why your smartphone today isaround a million times more powerful than
the computer that powered the Apollospacecraft as it flew to the moon,
because we're able to put more and morecomputing power on tiny pieces of silicon.
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So there's nothing we manufacture at thatmicroscopic scale, but by the
billions and billions every year.
And the fact that we're able to do so iswhy chips are today applied to
almost every type of device.
Chips are used in everything from totransport to fridges, clothing and beyond.
It's a $600 billion global trade and isexpected to surpass $1 trillion by 2030.
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But with chip advancement hascome the race for tech supremacy.
That's coming up after the break.
Get in touch with us by email atschroderspodcasts@schroders.
com or visit our website, schroders.
com/theinvestordownload.
It could be argued without the veryconcept of chips, globalisation, as
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we know it today, wouldn't exist.
It was the chip industry that, I think,pioneered the method of having offshore
production and having different componentsand devices manufactured in
multiple different countries.
We take that for granted today, but thatwas a real innovation when it was first
pioneered in the '50s, '60s, and '70s, andthe chip industry was at the forefront.
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Given the advancement in technology,processing power is being
regarded as the new oil.
Data and computing capabilities are agrowing importance in the digital economy,
much like oil was in the developmentof the 20th century economy.
And the trading chips isreflecting that importance.
If you look at world trade today, what youfind is that some of the biggest flows in
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world trade are actually chips that arebeing traded across borders.
China, for example, spends more money eachyear importing chips than
it spends importing oil.
There's no other flow in global tradethat's larger than the flow of chips into
China, and that's just one example.
Unfortunately, that's not wherethe similarity to oil ends.
Chip production is concentrated.
In fact, even more so than oil.
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Saudi Arabia produces, depending onthe year, 10 or 15% of the world's oil.
Taiwan produces around 90% ofthe most advanced processor chips.
So the amount of concentration in thehands of not just a single country, but
also a single company, in the caseof the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing
Company, is truly extraordinary.
I think you can argue that companies likeTSMC are among the most important
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companies in the world because the chipsthat they make are in everything,
not just in computers and phones, but incars and in washing machines and in
coffee makers and in medical devices.
The list goes on and on and on.
The rest of the world economy dependson these absolutely critical companies.
It's not just TSMC.
Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix supplyup to 75% of the world's memory chips.
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There's also ASML or advancedsemiconductor materials international
based in the Netherlands.
They're capable of producing machines thatcan use rays of extreme ultraviolet light
to carve nanometer scalecarvings into silicon.
That's billionths of a meter.
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They're able to do it in a way that'seconomically viable, so it can be used
in the manufacture of your smartphone.
They've got 100% market share in theproduction of absolutely critical chip
making toolsthat are used in the manufacture of every
chip that is trainingan AI system, for example,
and almost all the key processorsinside of a modern smartphone.
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It's not a surprise that there aren'tdozens of companies that can do this.
The amount of investment involved, theamount of R&D involved is
just mind bogglingly large.
While the concentration of productionmakes sense economically, it's irrational
from the perspective of the supply chain.
One mishap or a black swan event, let'ssay a global pandemic,
and the supply chain grinds to a halt.
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That's why the last couple of years we'veseen in Europe, in Japan, in the United
States, a number of big programs designedto incentivize the
production of chips in other locationswith the aim of adding
a bit of resiliency.
And it's expensive because we're pushingagainst the direction in which
markets would naturally go.
What are those programsand the potential fallout?
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That's coming up in thefinal part of the show.
Competition for chip technologystretches back decades.
It accelerated at the turn of themillennium as the role of semiconductors
proliferated in everything fromconsumer electronics to military tech.
But the chip war, thatbegan to escalate in 2018.
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President Trump is escalatinghis trade showdown with China.
Yeah, President Donald Trump justannounced that he's imposing 10% tariffs
on $200 billion worth of Chinese goods.
Another big story that we're trackingtoday, President Biden in announcing new
tariffs on $18 billionworth of Chinese goods.
And was exacerbated by the pandemic.
2021 has been a year ofcrisis for many industries.
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One of the biggest crises hasbeen the global chip shortage.
Miller says the battle for chip supremacy,while partly focused on trade, is
also about war and governments.
Well, I think the trade war in chips,which has been going on now for almost
half a decade, is partly about trade, butit's also partly about war, because from
the perspective of governments,they're interested in which companies are
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selling which types of chips, but they'realso interested in the strategic
capabilities that are enabledby these chips.
And so if you look at what are the partsof the chip industry that have been the
primary focus of governments, it's been onthe tools and the chips that
enable artificial intelligence.
And they're focused there because theybelieve, and I think they're probably
right to believe this, that AI is not justgoing to be good at creating chat bots.
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It's also going to be used to improve theway intelligence agencies operate or
to help military systems operateincreasingly semi-autonomously.
And the fact that it's hard to knowwhether a given AI system will be for
civilian use only or alsohave military applications.
While The Guardian is calling it AI'sOppenheimer moment due to the increasing
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appetite for combat tools that blendhuman and machine intelligence.
This has led to an influx of money tocompanies and government agencies that
promise they can make warfaresmarter, cheaper, and faster.
The US, as well as its allies, have beentrying to impose a bit more control over
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the types of chips and tools that make AIpossible so that they can ensure that the
military capabilities enabled by thosesystems don't benefit their competitors.
It's not just trade tariffs that countriesare using to stem the flow of
tech to countries such as China.
The US has used parts of the InflationReduction Act and the Chips Act
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to encourage more diverse chip productionwith allies and closer to home.
But is it working?
Well, there's certainly a race underway.
If you look at the data on investment inthe chip industry in the US,
there's a huge step change.
However, there's a lot of investmenthappening in Taiwan and in
Korea and in China as well.
And so I think the chip industry is goingto still largely remain focused in
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East Asia, even though you're going tohave more capacity coming online in the
US and also in Japan and Europe as well.
But we also shouldn't underestimatethe extraordinary engineering capability
in China, whichis trying very, very hard to catch up.
We're going to see this race play outbetween the Western supply chain and
Chinese competitors overthe coming years and probably decade.
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But with the cost of research anddevelopment a significant barrier, the
majority of countries, including China,still choose to rely on
their existing supply chain.
Even so, this is a long story, and itonly feels like we're entering act two.
Well, I think that's right.
And I think AI hasjust supercharged all of the dynamics that
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we've been discussing,both in terms of increasing demand for
chips, and we see that reflected withcompanies like NVIDIA, but also in terms
of raising the stakes,because the key driver of advances in AI
technology has been the ability to applymore processing power, in other
words, better chips to AI problems.
And so I think if you talk to big AI labsor big tech companies developing AI
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systems, you'll hear them relentlesslyfocused on getting access to the largest
number of the most advanced chips thatthey can because they think their most
likely bottleneck is totry to build out bigger and better AI
systems is goingto be access to the chips that they need.
The chip war is, I think, ongoing, both inits initial iteration as a conflict
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between governments to deploy chips tostrategic applications,
but also between companies is to try torace to build bigger and
better AI capable data centres.
Justbefore you go, I should say that this
podcast was recorded in conjunction withthe Financial Times business Book of the
Year, which is partnered by Schroders.
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Go to FT.com/bookaward to find out all thelatest news, including the 2024 Shortlist.
You can also listen to my full Unabridgedinterview with Miller on Schroders YouTube
channel, where we talk moreabout his book called Chip War.
That was the show.
We very much hope you enjoyed it.
You can subscribe to the InvestorDownload wherever you get your podcast.
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com.
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