Targeting global chip shifts more important than self-sufficiency: Chris Miller

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. 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.

“Diversification of global tech supply chains around China-related threats and risks is the right way to go. For India, which is trying to play a bigger role, it is important to be targeted and specific about certain parts of the tech supply chain that makes sense to be built in India.

Diversification, thus, is the right approach for public policy to truly frame what can be accomplished," he said. The professor was in India as a speaker at a chip design