Let me start with the most basic question.
If we talk about a race between the United States and China right now in
high tech, particularly involving the semiconductor, these chips.
Who's ahead and how far? Well, today there's an international
coalition of the U.S., Japan, the Netherlands and Taiwan, all of whom
produce technologies that are necessary for advanced chip making.
The most advanced chips themselves are actually manufactured largely in Taiwan,
which is multiple generations that had almost a decade ahead of the
capabilities that the leading Chinese firms have.
When we talk about chips, one of the things that Secretary Raimondo
emphasized and we've heard it before, the administration emphasized this week,
was we want to separate national security concerns from basic commercial
concerns and our competition with China. Is that doable when we're talking about
these very, very high end cutting edge chips?
Well, there are certain types of chips that are only used civilly and are only
used in military applications. When you're looking at the chips that
are used for training AI systems, they're used in both the exact same type
of chips that can train a car to drive autonomously.
It can also be used to train a drone to fly autonomously.
There's just no technological way of differentiating, and that's why the US
controls on the transfer of AI chips to China are going to have both a military
but also a civilian and commercial impact.
So in your book you talk about the history in the United States and
elsewhere of a relationship between the military, on the one hand, development
of semiconductors on the other. We now are talking about A.I.
all the time, whether civilian or military.
How much of this competition over semiconductors really is turning into an
issue of generative, large language, artificial intelligence?
You know, every military in the world, every intelligence agency, they're all
trying to understand how they can better apply AI and autonomous systems to
defense and intelligence uses that most A.I.
is going to end up in the civilian sphere.
But we can't underestimate the extent to which, whether it's autonomous drones or
better intelligence systems, they're already beginning to rely on AI, which
means they already require advanced chips to train them to act more
intelligently. So, of course, you say that we may be as
much as a generation, which maybe as much as a decade, maybe a little less
ahead right now of China. Can we preserve that lead?
I mean, those of us who remember sort of the Cold War remember thinking that
maybe the so you could never get an atomic bomb they came up with a pretty
quickly. Well, there's two aspects to preserving
the lead. One is racing faster than the Chinese,
which we've historically been pretty good at doing alongside the Taiwanese,
the Netherlands, the Japanese. And if you look at all of the R&D money
that the West is pouring into ship industry, it's substantial and it's
capped really dramatically over the past couple of decades.
But China has been catching up over the past several years, pouring lots and
lots of state subsidies into its industry.
And that's why the US, Japan and the Netherlands in particular have tightened
up their export controls on ship, making tools which now can no longer be
transferred to China to help China produce cutting edge chips.
And so the second part of the strategy, holding China back has taken on more
prominence in recent years. So those shipbuilding machines, again, I
learned from your book the lithography machines, right, that seem very, very
sophisticated, very high end. And as you say, there are restrictions
now placed on the ability for for Western countries to export those into
China. Can't China reverse engineer and make
their own lithography machines? Well, Chipmaking tools are really the
most complex tools that humans have ever made.
If you look at the most advanced lithography systems, which are produced
just by one company, ASML in the Netherlands, these have hundreds of
thousands of components inside of them, including the flattest mirrors humans
have ever made. One of the most powerful lasers ever
deployed on a commercial device and an explosion happening constantly inside of
them at a temperature of around 40 times the surface of the sun.
So this is really extraordinarily complex engineering.
And even if you copied all the files, you can't simply paste it into your
computer and hope to replicate it straightforwardly and the other facets.
These machines are getting better and better on a regular basis.
ASML is already preparing and then I here to release an even more capable
orthography system. So again, copying the last system is not
a great strategy for technological. Gojo So far we've been talking about
export restrictions, other restrictions to keep China from catching up.
What about attempts to really build up the capability of the United States and
other Western countries? And let's talk specifically about the
Chips and Science Act, because that was billed as something that we needed to do
so that we had our own homegrown. How realistic is that?
We can, through the Chips and Science Act and other activities, build up our
capacity here to match, For example, what we're seeing with TSMC over in
Taiwan with the US is never going to be
independent in semiconductors because the supply chain is just too
interrelated with Taiwan, with Japan, with Europe.
But the goal of the Chips in Science Act.
Is to put more money behind equalizing the cost of producing ships in the US
relative to other places in Asia.