Feed Drop: MIT CSAIL Alliances Podcast

**Sam Ransbotham** (0:03)
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Hi, listeners, Sam here. Today, we're sharing a bonus drop of an episode from our friends at the CSAIL Alliances podcast. Host Kara Miller speaks with Tufts professor, Chris Miller, author of Chip War, The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology. On this episode, Chris discusses the politics and possibilities for chip manufacturers globally. We hope you enjoy it.

**Kara Miller** (1:21)
Welcome to MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Labs, Alliances podcast. I'm Kara Miller.
On today's show, Chris Miller, the author of the best-selling book Chip War, talks about how semiconductors have come to shape our lives and why they're in the process of remaking business as we know it.

**Chris Miller** (1:47)
One of the problems of being successful is that you focus too much on defending your legacy industry rather than investing in what might come next.

**Kara Miller** (1:55)
Miller is a professor of international history at Tufts University, and he notes that as tech becomes more complicated and supply chains become more complex, companies are under a lot of pressure.

**Chris Miller** (2:09)
Every foreign firm looks at the Chinese market and simultaneously says, it's very large, we've got to sell there, but also in the long run, the Chinese state wants to squeeze us out and replace us with a domestic firm. That's a very hard dynamic for almost every company to manage.

**Kara Miller** (2:25)
So can the US maintain its competitive advantage when it comes to the chips that are in our coffee makers, our cars, and our phones?

**Chris Miller** (2:33)
The US is still in a pretty strong position, which doesn't mean that if the US squanders it by chasing away the world's smartest people, we're going to stay in the strongest position, but it does mean if we play our cards wisely, I think US researchers and US firms are likely to retain their lead in many of the key segments.

**Kara Miller** (2:51)
That conversation is coming right up. But first, CSAIL Alliances is the industry gateway to MIT's computer science and artificial intelligence labs. Members get access to CSAIL research, talent, conferences, and courses. If you want to learn more, visit csail.mit.edu/podcast. That's csail, c-s-a-i-l dot mit dot edu slash podcast.
In 1969, Jerry Sanders co-founded a company called AMD, Advanced Micro Devices, and Sanders had a very specific style. He wore a Rolex, he sported Gucci loafers, he had a beach house in Malibu and a Rolls-Royce. In fact, by his own account, he was maybe a little too flamboyant.

**Chris Miller** (3:47)
Jerry Sanders was representative of the old era, this kind of macho style in which you had to have your big, expensive, complicated manufacturing plant in order to be a real chip company.

**Kara Miller** (4:00)
Chris Miller says that for an older generation of chip makers, you couldn't really separate designing and manufacturing chips. The process was pretty integrated. Jerry Sanders loved to tell people that real men have fabs, which is to say the facilities that fabricate chips. But then, pretty quickly, technology pivoted.

**Chris Miller** (4:23)
There was a new set of software tools that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, came largely out of MIT, actually. And it enabled the abstraction of the chip design process away from manufacturing. And by the 80s and 90s, you could begin to be a chip designer and know basically nothing about manufacturing, or be a chip manufacturer and know very little about chip design.

**Kara Miller** (4:45)
All of a sudden, business models changed. The companies that designed chips and those that made chips were often two different groups of companies. Eventually, as AI came on the scene, lots of non-tech companies started to think about how their chips are designed and how that design can actually help optimize their processes. But manufacturing, that mostly got outsourced, which, no surprise, has had upsides and downsides.

**Chris Miller** (5:14)
Sandor has also had a quote comparing owning a fab to having a shark in your swimming pool, the logic being that sharks were very expensive to maintain, and in the end, it might end up eating you anyway. And I think that exposed the challenges of running these very expensive and complex manufacturing facilities even for someone like him who grew up with them.