I recently had the opportunity to review Chip War: The Quest to Dominate the World’s Most Critical Technology by Chris Miller for the Cybersecurity Canon.
Chip War belongs on your shelf, right next to Countdown to Zero Day and Sandworm. It doesn’t just explain the problem; it helps us understand how we got here.
Why This Matters for Security Professionals
The book traces chip development from Bell Labs through Moore’s Law to contemporary TSMC and Intel dominance. Miller’s narrative spans a century-spanning story that reads like a tech-thriller mashup connecting innovation, economics, and statecraft.
What struck me most was how geopolitical decisions and free-market capitalism converged to concentrate fabrication in Taiwan and South Korea. This optimization for efficiency inadvertently created strategic dependencies that we’re now scrambling to address.
Supply Chain Security Beyond Software
As someone who spends a lot of time thinking about supply chain security, this book reinforced that supply chain security isn’t just about firmware scanning—it extends to manufacturing locations and geopolitical control. The parallels with software supply chain issues like Log4Shell and SolarWinds are striking.
Western efforts to rebuild domestic capacity—including export controls and the CHIPS Act—appear reactive rather than proactive, attempting to rebuild a capability we once led after decades of letting it atrophy.
The Verdict
I rated this book as valuable for cybersecurity professionals who want to understand the broader context of hardware supply chain vulnerabilities. If you’re interested in how we got to this point of strategic dependency, this is essential reading.