Tech Unheard Episode 3: Chris Miller

[00:00:00] Rene Haas: Welcome to Tech Unheard, the podcast that takes you behind the scenes of the most exciting developments in technology. I’m Rene Haas, your host and CEO of Arm. Today, I’m joined by Chris Miller, Economic Historian at the Fletcher School at Tufts University and Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington.

Chris is the author of several books, including most recently Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology. He sat down with me to talk about his work as a leading academic in the semiconductor industry.

Chris, thanks so much for joining me.

[00:00:39] Chris Miller: Good to see you, and thanks for having me.

[00:00:41] Rene Haas: Oh, my pleasure. We are in incredibly interesting times here, January of 2025, as we get into the new year and everything associated with new administration. There’s a lot of things that we can cover that’s going to impact our industry, but you and I connected a few years ago when you were writing this book, Chip War, which is a magnificent piece of work, and we’ll talk more about that. But I’d like to maybe start, Chris, and just maybe have you give your background, how you got into the field that you did. However, you want to tell the story.

[00:01:13] Chris Miller: Fantastic. Well, as you know, I have no background in semiconductors or anything related to them. I’m a historian by training, studied history in college, decided that I wanted to pursue a career as a historian and so did a PhD in economic history and in particular in Russian economic history, which surprises a lot of people because there aren’t that many connections between Russian economic history and the semiconductor industry. But one of the questions that I got really interested in was what explains why some countries, despite having brilliant technologists and scientists and Nobel Prize winners, seem to have a lot of the key ingredients for technological progress but nevertheless failed to actually capitalize on them. That was the fate of Russia over the last couple of decades. And so I got interested in, well, why was Russia, despite having a lot of the preconditions, not nearly as good at computing as you might think. And that’s how I first got interested in why the US has an extraordinary semiconductor industry and Russia failed to develop one despite its extraordinary scientific and technological talent.

[00:02:19] Rene Haas: And why history? Why Russia? Were you, when you were growing up, enamored with going to museums and understanding history? And obviously I don’t have a degree in history, but I find that if you look back in history, it teaches you almost everything about the present and the future. But what was the catalyst for you? And what kind of got your curiosity into all that?

[00:02:37] Chris Miller: You know, I think it was, it was similar, desire to understand how the world came to be the way it is. And, you know, I’d studied a bit of economics and a bit of social sciences and found all those interesting, but the best lens for really making sense of the world actually seemed to be to understand how it came to be. And so to me, history was both fascinating in its own right, but also I think really illuminating for making sense of the world as it is today.

[00:03:03] Rene Haas: And the angle in Russia, was it USSR or was it Peter the Great? Or how far back into Russian history and economics?

[00:03:14] Chris Miller: You know, I started by getting very interested in the history of the Soviet Union. I was born in 1987, so I don’t really have any memories of when the Soviet Union actually existed. And when I started studying it, it seemed like this extraordinary alternative universe, with a totally different economic and social structure, which made no sense, but nevertheless existed for a full 70 years, an entire human lifespan in a country. And so that’s what first got me curious as to how did this country and this system work. But then eventually I ended up writing both one book on the Soviet Union and one book that stretches all the way back to Peter the Great and spent a number of years living in Russia as well and still have great affection for the entire history and culture of the country.

[00:03:58] Rene Haas: Oh my gosh. So do you speak Russian?

[00:03:59] Chris Miller: I do. Yes. Yeah. I spent a lot of time there before the political dynamics changed for the worse the last couple of years.

[00:04:06] Rene Haas: And I remember, you know, you and I were chatting in fact when you wrote the book, and I remember at the time a story internally, that I got an email, a blind email from a gentleman who was a history professor who wanted to talk to me. And I was thinking to myself, why does a history professor want to talk to the CEO of Arm. But I found the story of how you, maybe stumbled is not the right word but I’ll use it anyway, how you stumbled into telling the story that you did, because my understanding was that was not originally the story that you were intending to write, i.e. the history and story of the semiconductor industry.

[00:04:37] Chris Miller: That’s right. I really did start with the origins of the Russian semiconductor industry, which I thought was curious insofar as it wasn’t developed at all. Despite that, you know, just a couple of years after the first integrated circuits were invented in the US the Russians, or the Soviets at the time, were trying to build their own. And so the first question was, well, why did the US succeed and Russia fail? But as I was doing that research, I came to realize that although I sort of knew chips were everywhere in my phone and in my PC, I, like I think most people, hadn’t really realized just how pervasive they’d come across our entire lives. And I also hadn’t realized the extent to which the story of economic globalization, which everyone sort of knew, was in large part driven by the chip industry and how semiconductors were probably the best case study and how a product can be designed in one company and manufactured in a second and assembled in the third using chemicals from a fourth. There was really no more complex production process than semiconductors. And so you combine the sort of question of the rise of the modern tech sector with the rise of globalization. You couldn’t understand any of that without really putting semiconductors at the center of your analysis. And like most people, I knew what chips were vaguely, but I’d never really thought about them as being important. And yet, as I looked at the world, I realized I couldn’t really make sense of anything unless I understood better how this industry functions.

[00:06:02] Rene Haas: What were some of the things as you got into your research? And as I said, the research you did on this book was just magnificent. I’ve talked to a number of colleagues and I started in the semiconductor industry in the middle eighties, so before you were born. And colleagues of mine reading the book, we just felt like, my gosh, we’re reading the story of our careers in terms of how you just cover the entire landscape. But what were some of the surprises as you started to do your research and talk to the key influencers in the industry, what were some of the things that were most surprising to you?

[00:06:32] Chris Miller: Well, I think the first surprise really was the pervasiveness of semiconductors. You know, I, as I mentioned, I knew there were chips in computers and phones, but I think like most people, I hadn’t really come to terms with the fact that there were hundreds of chips in a typical car, for example, or in basically every electronic around my home from my fridge to my microwave, there were chips. Or that as you connected more devices together, that was all driven by improvements in semiconductors. I’d sort of thought of all those as discrete parts of the economy, whereas in reality, it’s chips that unite them all together. So that was one big surprise, just the centrality of semiconductors and enabling every sector of the economy to grow. The second surprise was looking at the way in which no one, not a single country in the world was anywhere close to self-sufficient and producing their own semiconductors. And you had these extraordinary value chains stretching across every major economy. And it was this collective effort that made possible the innovations that semiconductors required and that they in turn enabled. That was a surprise to me. And the third surprise was something that I’d been aware of through kind of discussions of Moore’s law, but had never really thought about, and I think most people haven’t really thought about what it means to have exponential growth over half a century. And that dynamic, when you compare it to any other segment of the economy, is totally extraordinary. And thinking through what that has enabled, I think was the third surprise. I sort of knew about it, but I never really thought about it. And when you do start to think about it, it really is a mind boggling in terms of the rate of progress.

[00:08:10] Rene Haas: Now there was a point in time where the US was quite vertically integrated as far as semiconductors go. And I, again, I started my career back at TI and back in the day TI had fabs all over Texas. There were packaging facilities in Texas. The test equipment that we used at TI to test chips were based in the United States. Was it just economics, do you think that pushed them offshore, and them not being TI, but the whole industry? And, or, if you look back in terms of the decision that drove that, could the US have done anything different relative to keeping that capability inside the United States?

[00:08:49] Chris Miller: You know, I think one of the most fun parts of my research was interviewing folks from companies like TI who were working there even before you in the fifties and sixties. I had a chance to speak to some people who were in the really early stages of the industry. And as you allude to, they were producing not just their own test equipment, but their own materials, their own wafers, their own chemicals. Everything was done in house and you had to do it like that at the start because that was, there were no suppliers. But one of the things that I think I realized was that as technology got more complex, it just became impossible for one company to specialize in ultra purified chemicals and ultra complex software tools and ultra capable lithography systems. You had to have the value chain split out into different companies so that you could have the specialization that made technological progress possible. So, I think that dynamic was certainly inevitable. The fact you have not just integrated but separate suppliers for different types of components and processes. I think it was also to some degree inevitable and in a lot of ways a good thing that you had a integrated supply chain that stretched across all the world’s advanced economies because it meant that you could defray capital costs of investments, not just in the US, but also globally. And so it was a good thing you were able to access the Japanese market in European markets and Asian markets, etcetera as well. And I think the third thing was that as the technology became more specialized and you know, I think if you look at lithography, which I spent a lot of time studying there’s great examples of this, you really needed the combined expertise of the best optical experts in Germany, plus the best chemical experts in Japan. You needed to tap into that global talent base. And so that was also a key learning that I took away. It’s easy to, I think, have a simple view that we wish it hadn’t become so globalized because it becomes harder to control. And I understand that impulse, but I think you’d also have lost a lot of technological progress had it just been stuck within national boundaries.

[00:10:44] Rene Haas: No, I think that’s completely right and you stated very well, the sheer complexity of the shrinking of the transistors and the pace at which we were shrinking them required global innovation in terms of contributing to all that. And whether it was ASML or applied materials or Tokyo Electron, you needed companies across the planet and the globe. In your research, what I remember going back down history lane here, and I was again, the TI in the eighties and at that time, Japan Inc. was really starting to become hugely influential. When I was at TI, TI was the number one semiconductor company in the world by revenue. By the time I left, I think it was Toshiba, NEC, and Hitachi that were the number one, two, and three. This is before Intel started to catch momentum. Why did Japan lose the magic? There was a time where the US was looking at all kinds of tariffs and restrictions and anti-dumping with the Japanese. Why do you think the Japanese lost the recipe?

[00:11:42] Chris Miller: You know, I think there were two challenges that Japan faced in the 1980s that didn’t really become visible until the end of the decade or even the early 1990s. And the first was that many of the key Japanese firms, especially the big conglomerates, were making investment decisions based less on profitability and more on market share. And so if you measure by revenue, certainly it’s true, they were among the largest in terms of revenue. If you measure by profitability, that wasn’t always the case. And the fact that they were these big conglomerates that were closely tied with the banks that were funding their capital expansion plans meant that they didn’t face the same market pressures as US firms, which seemed like an asset and was an asset in terms of market share, but wasn’t an asset in terms of profitability. And so the moment Japanese banks started pulling back and companies had to look towards capital markets to fund themselves, they realized that they weren’t actually profitable enough to raise money in capital markets. So that was something that was a surprising vulnerability relative to what everyone thought it was in the 1980s. So that was something that was a surprising vulnerability relative to what everyone thought it was in the 1980s. So that was one reason. The second reason was that Japanese semiconductor firms were generally, especially the big conglomerates, because they were vertically integrated to a much greater degree, they were more inward looking. And again, I think that seemed like an asset at times, but it ended up being a vulnerability because they were less in tune to the ways that technology was changing. And you mentioned Intel, which really was able to capitalize on the emergence of the PC years ahead of any Japanese competitors, because they were looking at a broader ecosystem than the Japanese firms were looking at.

[00:13:12] Rene Haas: Yeah, I know. I feel like my tombstone is full of experiences of companies that were going through. Then I was with NEC Semiconductor during the middle of 1990s. And to your point, I think that’s exactly what hurt these companies was the vertical integration and insular viewpoint. Because when, when the internet in quote happened and suddenly the world was flat and everything was open. Suddenly it was very, very difficult for the Japanese to move quickly. And, obviously then as your point to both the combination of the PC and the internet, suddenly the world had completely changed. And then we kind of bridging onto that, should nations be very, very prescriptive in terms of taking care of local manufacturing? There’s an Intel question there, obviously relative to the US, but it’s even more broadly, whether it’s automobiles or other critical industries. Do you think semiconductors, when you look at their importance and criticality, that policy needs to be shaped, there’s CHIPS Act, but maybe even more broadly, something even more comprehensive?

[00:14:07] Chris Miller: So I think if you go back to where we started the conversation about the benefits of having internationally integrated supply chains, that illustrates the risks of being solely focused on a national manufacturing base. Now, you know, if you’re the United States, you’re the world’s largest economy. And so you’ve got the most scope, I think, to try to focus on a manufacturing base that’s domestic relative to smaller countries. But even still, I think there are real, certainly costs and also risks involved of focusing solely on domestic manufacturing. I think for, you know, certain government applications, it’s understandable governments want that, but that’s a small share of the market, obviously. And, and that’s, you know, why I think, I do give some credit to some of the policymakers in places like the US and Japan and Europe, who have been trying on the one hand to build up manufacturing in general in Western countries, but also not solely focused on their own country and still recognizing the importance of components and materials, et cetera, being traded between countries. I don’t think any of them are solely focused on their own manufacturing base and not recognizing kind of the importance of these broader international linkages. But I do think it’s a constant challenge to balance on the one hand, the political impulse to have more at home, and on the other hand, the industry impulse to let’s be as efficient as possible. And there are complex balances to be struck there.

[00:15:31] Rene Haas: Do you think governments understand it well? I mean, obviously we’re in the midst of a transition here in our own government, but I think you raise a really important point because on one level, people can look at CHIPS Act, for example, and say, I’m just going to give money to people or grants to who are end quote manufacturing inside the United States. But to your point, it’s just one small piece of a gigantic value chain, whether it’s equipment, whether it’s packaging, the wafers are just a small piece. Do you think that’s well enough understood, the broadness of the problem?

[00:16:02] Chris Miller: Well, that’s a good question. Yeah. Yeah. It’s a challenge, I think. You know, it is a challenge with regard to any industry, the government’s trying to understand, industry will always understand industry better. I think in the case of the semiconductor industry, especially in the United States, but I think it’s true across advanced economies, there had been much less interaction between industry, the semiconductor industry and government over the prior 10 or 15 years than over the last five years. And so there’d been a whole generation of folks in government who hadn’t really engaged with the semiconductor industry. And I think there’s been a lot of learning that’s been done over the last five or so years in the US and Japan and Europe about what the supply chain looks like, who the major players are, what their needs and requirements are. Certainly there’s still a major gap between what the typical person in government and what the typically person in industry knows that’s inevitable. But yes, there’s been lots of learning and studying that’s been undertaken the past half decade or so.

[00:17:00] Rene Haas: Have you got it, I know that when I met with folks in Washington, when I would just do our rounds with our team, they would ask questions about our industry. And I would quote your book. I would say, “Look, if you want, if you want, a primer on learning how this industry works, go pick up Chris Miller’s book.” Have you been inundated with requests for, “hey, teach me more about how this industry works” from government, both in the US and abroad, I would say, because the book is a global, it’s a global industry in the book obviously has global impacts.

[00:17:26] Chris Miller: Yeah, I think there’s been a lot of interest in both US and other governments and also I think the other key player here is the media, which plays a big role in educating the public and also educating government about how the industry works. And I think in the media as well, outside of specific tech-focused publications, there’s been a fair number of journalists who find themselves having to write a lot more about this semiconductor industry and how we had to learn a lot over the past couple of years about how it actually works.

[00:17:52] Rene Haas: There was a period where the semiconductor industry was not considered the most alluring sector to be talking about, let alone writing about. Why do you think that was?

[00:18:00] Chris Miller: You know, I think there were a couple of dynamics there. One was the rise of big software firms in the 90s, 2000s, 2010s, which were, of course, using a whole lot of semiconductors, but the public perception was that it was all about software or all about the consumer internet driving technological progress. And there’s, you know, a degree of truth to that. I do think that the fact that if you think of the big tech companies that emerged in the 2000s and 2010s, they were largely software focused. That shifted how the public in general viewed the tech sector. And so Silicon Valley, which of course was named after silicon, I came to be associated with social media as a result of that. I think that that has changed the last couple of years partly due to the supply chain dynamics, partly due to the politics, but also I think due to the fact that there has been a recognition that actually over the last couple of years, and I think looking forward into the future as well, it’s going to be advances in the hardware that will be just as important as advances in the software, especially when it comes to artificial intelligence. And I think the public perception of that has begun to shift in the last couple of years.

[00:19:09] Rene Haas: Yeah, I think so. It’s, it’s nice to see one of the largest market cap companies in the world being a company that’s in our sector and now you have Broadcom in the trillion dollar club. I know that when we were having to explain, you know, post/during the NVIDIA transaction, and then as we were going public, what does Arm do exactly? It’s to your point. It’s all that software has to run on something. I want to talk a little bit about China. Obviously there’s a lot we could cover on that topic, but you know, in your book and subsequently afterwards, you were referring to just end quote, how far behind China might be in terms of catching up with Western technologies, whether that’s around their internal capability to build EUV machines and, or having the fabs being able to catch up to where the leading edge nodes are with a TSMC or Samsung or Intel, whatnot. If you think about when you wrote the book and where things are now, is China catching up? Are they about where they were when you wrote the book? Or have they fallen behind?

[00:20:07] Chris Miller: Well, I think it’s a, it’s a complex question to answer because it depends what exactly you want to measure. And of course if you measure progress in design capabilities versus fabrication capabilities versus the tools themselves, you get different answers. There’s two ways that I think I look at this that we’ve got pretty good data on. You know, the first would be what’s the most advanced fabrication capability in Taiwan versus in China. And you know, there, I think we saw last year, SMIC rolled out relatively high volume manufacturing of their 7-9 meter capability, which we saw TSMC do about five years previously. So that’s a ballpark five year gap and you can debate around the margin, but I think that’s pretty good data. And you can actually track that gap historically, and what you find is that over the last 15 or so years, it’s been around steady, steady around five years that every year there’s advances at SMIC, TSMC and the gap is pretty standardized over time. So there, I think there hasn’t been a major change in one direction or the other. I think the other interesting place to look is when it comes to semiconductor manufacturing equipment. And there, you know, again, you can debate how best to interpret the data. But if you zoom into lithography tools, which has been one of the key areas of focus. You know, what you find is that China’s imports of foreign lithography equipment are actually at record highs right now, which, you know, doesn’t suggest a rapid degree of domestication. I think for some of the older, less capable lithography tools, there is some domestication happening, but at a pretty slow rate. And so there too, there’s a gap that remains. I think if you look at other spheres, you get different answers. Design, for example, there’s obviously very capable chip designers in China. There’s been some domestication of some of the chemicals and materials, but I guess the places where we’ve got the most visibility into you know, full like unlike comparisons between China and Taiwan, for example that gap remains broadly unchanged.

[00:22:08] Rene Haas: Is it EUV and the mirrors associated with it? Do you think that is, kind of, if you look at the one critical component of the semiconductor value chain and say, gosh, China’s just not making head roads in terms of closing the gap. Is it EUV primarily, or do you think there’s other pieces of the value chain?

[00:22:23] Chris Miller: You know, I think EUV is certainly the hardest single thing to replicate. The fact that it took ASML three decades and many billions of dollars to first develop illustrates just the scale of the challenge there. But I also think that that’s just one of many tools you need and there’s many precise chemicals you need to manufacture semiconductors, and so there’s a lot of different units that make it so hard. And if you were to solve the EUV problem, you’d still have many other challenges you’d have to work out, even though EUV is the biggest of the challenges in my view. And so I think, you know, it’s worth tracking really closely, what evidence can we see of competitors to ASML coming online. I think right now, not much evidence that that’s making progress, but of course, you know, that could change in the future. And that will be worth tracking closely.

[00:23:12] Rene Haas: Now, I know you said you’re a historian, not a technologist, but you know a lot about our industry. You’ve talked to a lot of people and you’ve done an amazing amount of research. Are there new areas of technology that you find that could be very interesting, whether it’s around photonics, different materials, quantum. With the advent of AI, are there areas that you have bumped into from a technology space that you’ve looked at and say, “Hey, now this, in the next 5 to 10 years could be incredibly interesting and compelling in terms of changing how products are designed and developed”?

[00:23:41] Chris Miller: You know, I think the AI boom is simultaneously very good for the existing structure of the industry because big customers are spending huge sums buying as many high end chips as possible. But the fact that they’re spending huge sums also creates a very big incentive to create new technologies that can do the same for cheaper. I think there’s lots of work being done on how within the existing paradigm can you economize on different facets, certainly photonic interconnects being an area of great focus right now. I don’t know about photonic integrated circuits themselves and their maturation. I think quantum computing is a place where, you know, there’s been great optimism about quantum computing for a long time. And it’s, I think, had cycles of optimism and pessimism. I guess I’m struck by the number of people working on quantum computing capabilities that they envision will integrate seamlessly into classical computing. And so rather than sort of a trade off, you’re going to have quantum and not use as much classical, you’re actually going to use both, I think is a way a lot of people now see them developing. And so, that’s actually not a bad thing for the semiconductor industry. It could be a good thing if you open up entire new capabilities and as a result demand more classical chips, as well as whatever quantum capabilities that we’re able to develop. And so when I kind of look forward, it seems to me that we’re still going to need very large volumes of as many high end processors we can make, even if quantum proves as a capable as the most bullish estimates suggest.

[00:25:04] Rene Haas: Yeah, it feels that way at our company. We view it as more likely a hybrid type of solution where you’ve got kind of classic compute working with a quantum machine that could do acceleration of such, But it is an incredibly fascinating time as far as where that all is headed. Are you surprised again, I think your book came out and was it ‘22?

[00:25:20] Chris Miller: That’s right.

[00:25:21] Rene Haas: Yeah. So Chat GPT had maybe not had its lightning rod moment. But two, three years later, are you surprised at the velocity of which we’re seeing all of this innovation taking place with AI workloads, whether it’s again around training or inference or reasoning models, et cetera, et cetera.

[00:25:36] Chris Miller: You know, I think, I think everyone’s surprised. I think it’s been an extraordinary two and a half years since the Chat GPT moment now. You know, I look back to when I wrote the book and I had a chapter on NVIDIA looking in particular at NVIDIA’s AI efforts. I had not a full chapter, but a fair bit on Google and its TPUs, but I could never have predicted just the speed at which both innovation has happened, but also a recognition that you can pretty quickly turn this innovation into real products. I think that’s been the surprise. And so the fact that all of the world’s big tech companies from Microsoft to Meta and across the board are now rapidly increasing their spending on data centers, which means on semiconductors. That’s a surprise to them. It was surprised to most of the chip industry. It was a surprise to me too.

[00:26:25] Rene Haas: Are you an AI optimist or, or pessimist or somewhere, somewhere in the middle?

[00:26:29] Chris Miller: Well, I think I’m broadly an optimist. I mean, I think we collectively have a challenge in making sure all of the investment that’s being undertaken leads to products that are monetizable and economically value additive. Whenever you’ve got this big surge of investment, there’s always some uncertainty. Will we have the business models to justify it in the long run? And so that’s, you know, a task that I think technology companies will have to prove out over the next couple of years, but it seems to me just given the rate of improvement over the last two and a half years since Chat GPT, there’s going to be a whole range of applications that we’re just beginning to get our heads around. I mean, I like the analogy of going back to the internet. You know, if we’re in like 1995, Google had yet to be founded, social media as a concept didn’t exist. And so I think we’ve got a long runway of turning new technologies into new products.

[00:27:21] Rene Haas: I think, yeah, I use that a lot myself, which I think is a very good parallel. And the internet in many ways created a lot of new jobs and opportunities and eliminated some to some extent, as all major technological innovations do. Do you have a perspective on that as a story and watching this closely in terms of, “hey, this time it’s different,” or “no, it’s going to look just like it’s always look for these type of things”?

[00:27:47] Chris Miller: You know, one of the very early computer researchers in the 1950s, a gentleman named Licklider or Lick as he was known to his friends, he worked for DARPA and played a big role in funding a lot of the early computer projects. And he wrote a paper in the mid fifties that laid out how he spent most of his day. And he estimated that he spent, very smart guy, but he spent 85 to 90 percent of his day, he estimated, on intellectual drudgery, things that ought to have been automated, but we’re not automatable. And I reread that paper recently. And I asked myself what share of my day is spent on things that I wish was easily automated. And I think it’s not 85 percent, but it’s still shockingly high. And so, I think most knowledge workers are actually going to embrace automating more of the stuff that now is impossible to automate, but they would actually greatly benefit from automating. And I think, you know, we easily forget that in the early days of the PC revolution programs like VisiCalc, the early version of Excel, were, when they were first brought to market in the late seventies and early eighties were seen to be catastrophic for the accounting industry because you no longer have people running the books manually. And in fact, the accounting profession has survived and thrived despite automation that was brought to them. And I think that’s the right analogy for AI. We’re gonna have lots of applications and lots of different professions, but on net, it’s going to make most of these professions much more pleasant because the not fun part of the job will be automated and the interesting and the fun part of the jobs will largely be maintained.

[00:29:11] Rene Haas: Yeah, that’s a good way to look at it. It’s a bit of the way I tend to think about it too at times where if I look about our industry, semiconductors, and you made a great point in terms of as the chips became more and more complex, they had to be outsourced to other parts of the world for manufacturing. As the designs become more and more complex, you spend far less time on invention, and more and more time just figuring out does this thing work and how do I verify it and how do I validate it? And bug fixes and verification is actually the lion’s share of what it takes to develop intellectual property and or chips. And if AI can help with the drudgery of that I think it’s going to be a good thing. I promise not to get too much into the politics of the new administration and such. But as you go into thinking about the new administration and, and how the world’s going to look like for semiconductors, do you think it will be a better time in terms of, the friction will get less in terms of the globalization of semiconductors, including China, or do you think we might be in for a bumpy four years?

[00:30:07] Chris Miller: You know, I think there’ll be a lot of continuity actually between the incoming administration and the Biden administration in large part, because what the Biden administration did had a lot of continuity with the first Trump administration. When you look at efforts to promote domestic manufacturing to the CHIPS Act, that was legislation that first emerged in Congress under the Trump administration. And I think there’ll be continuity broadly there. Maybe some changes are around the margin, but I think, you know, that’s a bipartisan issue in Congress for sure. I think also on the restrictions on technology transfer to China and to other countries, I think those are going to largely persist as well. Maybe some change around the margin, but you know, there are two, if you look in Congress, you’ve got Republicans and Democrats broadly supportive. So, you know, certainly is there going to be scope for zigzagging and scope for tweaks? No doubt. Does every president want to rebrand policies as their own policy rather than repetition of their predecessors? No doubt. But I think when you zoom out, I think there will be a lot of continuity. I think the one place where maybe we’re going to see a bit of change is on the question of trade policy and tariffs, where, you know, on the one hand, we did see the Biden administration impose new tariffs on semiconductors imported from China to the US, but I think President-Elect Trump has talked a lot more about making tariffs a central pillar of his trade policy. And so we’ll see, you know, over what time horizon at what scale, but I do think I expect more tariffs, which will certainly impact any industry that’s as globally integrated as the semiconductor industry.

[00:31:36] Rene Haas: It’s going to be exciting for sure. Is there another book in the works?

[00:31:39] Chris Miller: You know what, I’m spending so much time just tracking everything that’s changing in the semiconductor industry, I’ve got no time for a new book. I hope to dive into one soon, but nothing to announce yet.

[00:31:50] Rene Haas: Got it. Cool. Chris, thank you very much for spending time with us.

[00:31:53] Chris Miller: Hey, thank you. This is a lot of fun.

[00:31:59] Rene Haas: Thanks for listening to this month’s episode of Tech Unheard. We’ll be back next month for another look behind the boardroom door. To be sure you don’t miss new episodes, follow Tech Unheard wherever you get your podcasts. Until then, thanks for listening to Tech Unheard.

[00:32:13] Credits: Arm Tech Unheard is a custom podcast series from Arm and National Public Media. Executive Producers Erica Osher and Shannon Boerner. Project Manager Colin Harden. Creative Lead Producer Isabel Robertson. Editors Andrew Meriwether and Kelly Drake. Composer Aaron Levison.

Arm production contributors include Ami Badani, Claudia Brandon, Simon Jared, Jonathan Armstrong, Ben Webdell, Sofia McKenzie, Kristen Ray and Saumil Shah. Tech Unheard is hosted by Arm CEO Rene Haas.