An interview with Chris Miller, a Tufts professor and author of the book Chip War, on EUV lithography, ASML's role in global chip manufacturing, TSMC, and more
Professor Chris Miller's new book Chip War explains the complicated global politics inside your iPhone. Tweets: @brianweeden Tweets: @brianweeden : The global battle over chip manufacturing and why the US is trying to stop China from buying machines from the Netherlands https://www.theverge.com/... Expand More For Next Unexpand More For Next
Context & Ripple Effects
Chris Miller's Chip War arrives as the capstone to an arc this coverage has been building for years: ASML's $150M+ EUV machines as the physical bottleneck of advanced chips, and Washington's push to keep them out of China. The interview distills that story into one argument — control the tools, control who can manufacture at the edge.
It lands between two data points that prove the stakes: TSMC chair Mark Liu arguing in a prior interview that US-led localization won't actually improve supply chain resilience, and SMIC demonstrating months later that DUV-only 7nm production is possible without EUV. Miller's framing gives policymakers and readers the vocabulary for both.
First-order effects
- US pressure on the Netherlands to block ASML exports lands directly on Chinese fabs like SMIC, which has already shown it will engineer around missing EUV tools using DUV workarounds.
Second-order effects
- TSMC stays pinned between its largest customer relationships in China and US tech policy dictates — the squeeze Mark Liu has described across multiple interviews — while Beijing treats domestic lithography as a national program rather than a procurement problem.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, advanced chipmaking bifurcates into two toolchains — an ASML/TSMC/US-aligned stack and a China domestic stack — with single-supplier chokepoints like ASML becoming instruments of statecraft rather than just vendors.
The trend: Semiconductor manufacturing is reorganizing along geopolitical lines, with toolmakers like ASML functioning as chokepoints whose export decisions now set the boundaries of national chip capability.