Target Global Chip Shifts, Not Self-Sufficiency: Chris Miller

The Chip War author batted for strategic focus on diversification of global tech innovation

- Shouvik Das

Nailing down a strategic focus on diversification of global technology innovation away from established powers will offer India its biggest opportunities to grow in global relevance, said Chris Miller, author of global bestseller Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology and professor of international history at Tufts University in the US, in an interview with Mint.

Speaking about India's opportunities to become part of a global semiconductor supply chain that is largely ruled by Taiwan and the US, Miller said that the one key strategy for policymakers to adopt would be strategic targeting of incentives to fill gaps in the global supply chain—rather than project "self-sufficiency" as a geopolitical and technological strategy.

"We should be very wary of the politicized term of 'self-sufficiency' in semiconductors and electronics—there's no country in the world that's self-sufficient. Even China, which projects itself as self-sufficient, is not—it relies on various parts of the world for tools, chemicals and more," Miller said.

Highlighting this, Miller further underlined China's self-interest foreign strategy as "aggressive and belligerent"—but also referred to it as one that would create scope for India to cash in on.