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Beneath the race to train and release more powerful AI models lies another race: a race by companies and nation-states to secure the hardware to make sure they win AI supremacy.
Correction: The latest available Nvidia chip is the Hopper H100 GPU, which has 80 billion transistors. Since the first commercially available chip had four transistors, the Hopper actually has 20 billion times that number. Nvidia recently announced the Blackwell, which boasts 208 billion transistors - but it won’t ship until later this year.
Chris Miller is the author of Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology, a geopolitical history of the computer chip. He previously wrote three other books on Russia, including Putinomics: Power and Money in Resurgent Russia; We Shall Be Masters: Russia's Pivots to East Asia from Peter the Great to Putin; and The Struggle to Save the Soviet Economy: Mikhail Gorbachev and the Collapse of the USSR. He also serves as Associate Professor of International History at the Fletcher School, where his research focuses on technology, geopolitics, economics, international affairs, and Russia. He has previously served as the Associate Director of the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy at Yale, a lecturer at the New Economic School in Moscow, a visiting researcher at the Carnegie Moscow Center, a research associate at the Brookings Institution, and as a fellow at the German Marshall Fund's Transatlantic Academy. He received his Ph.D. and MA from Yale University and his BA in history from Harvard University.
To make sense of the current state of politics, economics, and technology, we must first understand the vital role played by chips
Gordon Moore, the Intel co-founder behind Moore's Law, passed away in March of 2023
Nvidia's GPUs are in high demand - and the company is using AI to accelerate chip production
