The Microchip Titans

Mason Wong reviews three books related to US-China tech industries and global competition.

By Mason WongSeptember 28, 2025

• Science & Technology

• Politics

WE LIVE IN pivotal times, so the conventional wisdom goes. The fate of the global order hangs in the balance. Talk of a “new Cold War” abounds—a vast rivalry is playing out between the United States, ostensibly representing “the West,” and China, a revisionist power representing something else. Key to this competition is dominance in emerging technologies: artificial intelligence, semiconductor manufacturing, quantum computing, and more.

This logic of competition has taken hold in both the United States and China. In a speech delivered in October 2020, Chinese Communist Party (CCP) General Secretary Xi Jinping remarked that the world order today is “undergoing great changes unseen in a century, of which scientific and technological innovation is a key variable.” In the United States, a research initiative from the hawkish Center for a New American Security, a leading think tank and reliable barometer for the DC mainstream, argues that “whoever leads in emerging technologies […] will garner economic, military and political strength for decades.”

Stories of great-power competition are buoyed by a sense of ethical urgency. In one telling, how a society uses technology reflects its values; thus, the race for technological advancement is really a race to determine the shape and structure of governance in the world. US political rhetoric has quickly adapted to this morality tale: a press release from a congressional committee focused on competition with China, for example, claims that the current situation “compels [the] US to dominate critical technologies in [the] 21st century,” warning that the CCP “will use this technology for evil.” The aforementioned Center for a New American Security’s call to action on tech policy includes a similar admonition, entreating “like-minded nations” to “safeguard liberal-democratic institutions and to act as a bulwark against authoritarian powers.”

But even as public rhetoric about technology adopts a dire and often self-righteous tone, the ethical and normative stakes of this contest become less clear. Who are these emerging technologies meant to serve? What principles should guide their use? As the relationship between China and the United States continues to chill, and voices in both countries call for the intensification of technological competition, the discourse about the role of technology in US-China relations seems more and more to have settled into an assortment of nihilistic paeans to power that leave values by the wayside.

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We are fortunate, perhaps, that so many key players in the US-China tech competition are eager writers. In China, the CCP and its governing organs, staffed by ideological apparatchiks and state intellectuals, expel reams of texts every year on the country’s approach to technology. Meanwhile, in the United States, business leaders and policy experts from the tech industry regularly pen alarmist treatises on the necessity of the United States maintaining its technological lead.

A recently released case in point, from the Silicon Valley side of the Pacific, is The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, authored by Palantir Technologies executives Alexander C. Karp (co-founder and CEO) and Nicholas W. Zamiska (head of corporate affairs and legal counsel). The Technological Republic works well as a volume to place beside CCP speeches and strategy documents: it straightforwardly presents an argument for the role of technology and the tech industry in a project to restore national greatness. We can also learn a lot about the incentives and beliefs that structure tech competition from the authorial and institutional context in which this book was written.

By all accounts, Alex Karp, a German-trained critical theorist who left academia to slide into the tech industry in the early 2000s, is its principal author. In recent years, Karp has made a name for himself as a leading voice on technological competition, calling for an “all-country effort” to win the AI race against China and warning that the United States is in an “us or them” situation vis-à-vis its competitors.

Befitting the emergence of a bipartisan consensus about tech competition in his home country, Karp’s politics are somewhat nebulous. He supported Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign and has at times been willing to criticize the first Trump administration and the European Far Right in public; he also describes himself as a “socialist”—or, alternatively, a “neo-Marxist.” At the same time, he is a close ally of the right-wing megadonor Peter Thiel, another tech capitalist moonlighting as a public intellectual. Together, they founded Palantir, a surveillance company named—as the historian Gabriel Winant put it—“in the Thiel house style” after “some Tolkien bullshit” in The Lord of the Rings. Like Thiel, Karp has engendered a cult following among investors and employees, with some going as far as to call him the “Philosopher King of Data Warfare.”

But The Technological Republic is not just the manifesto of a former academic with a devoted following. Karp’s company is deeply entangled with the executive branch: Palantir has emerged as a major beneficiary of the Donald Trump presidency, signing contracts worth billions with the US Army and Immigration and Customs Enforcement while key federal agencies adopt Palantir software as part of a wider effort to create what The New York Times describes as “detailed portraits of Americans based on government data.”

Former Palantir employees have also taken up starring roles in the federal government. Months into Trump’s second term, the senior ranks of the new administration would already boast several prominent Palantir alumni—one, the company’s former head of intelligence, ensconced atop the federal budget apparatus; another, himself an author and strident exponent of technological competition with China, appointed to a high-level post in the State Department. A panoply of younger Palantirians (as they are called) litter the lower positions in Trumpworld, most notably at the newly rechristened and nebulously empowered US Digital Service, now known as the Department of Government Efficiency.

We should therefore read The Technological Republic as representative of a growing and highly influential tendency in American political thought, one that regards technological competition with China as an existential issue and takes a very specific perspective on the way this competition might be resolved in the United States’ favor.

This perspective remains quite consistent throughout The Technological Republic, though the book’s erratic presentation often works to obscure its underlying message. Karp, drawing on his academic background, has taken great pains to brand himself as a prolific thinker; the pages of The Technological Republic are, as a result, quite scattered, jumping among topics in a haphazard and disjointed way. The book begins with a relatively direct rallying cry about tech competition but quickly veers into more eclectic terrain, including a digression about the ills of postmodernism and, most bafflingly, a section on campus cancel culture that seems to be little more than a thinly veiled reaction to college students’ mild objections to Palantir recruiting at university career fairs. One gets a sense that Karp’s authorial style might be, despite his claims otherwise, defined by a type of postmodern pastiche—that Karp is the type of intellectual who, to borrow the words of the literary theorist Fredric Jameson, “cannibalizes all the […] styles of the past and combines them in overstimulating ensembles.” But even in the midst of this overstimulating conversation, it remains possible to draw out a clear account of Karp’s worldview.

One of The Technological Republic’s most consistent preoccupations is an interest in what Karp refers to as “civilization.” Early in the book, Karp declares the race for tech supremacy as a moment to “decide who we are […] as a society and a civilization,” and this type of language continues throughout. As the book progresses, Karp treats us to a quick tour of civilizations East and West: an excoriation of “the systematic attack and attempt to dismantle any conception of American or Western identity during the 1960s and 1970s”; a warning about the ways in which Xi Jinping and other non-Western leaders “have wielded and retained power in a way that most of our current political leaders in the West will never understand”; and, most importantly, a brief exploration of the concept of “the West” itself—featuring, of course, a desultory citation of Samuel P. Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996).

What exactly does Karp mean by “the West,” much less “civilization”? Occasionally, The Technological Republic gestures toward cultural preferences—and, more rarely, values—in a brief manner, referencing, for example, the West’s apparently “unrelenting faith in science” and lamenting a recent Western “loss of cultural ambition.” Elsewhere, in a chapter in which he decries the influence of postcolonial scholars like Edward Said, Karp invokes the historian William H. McNeill, whose argument against the equality of all cultural traditions “would almost certainly require cancellation today.” Notably, Karp’s defense (so to speak) of McNeill—and, by proxy, the superiority of the West—does not include any substantive argument about culture, only a mention that Western empires “came to control 74 percent of global economic production by the 1910s” and a complaint that people are no longer able to acknowledge the “overwhelming dominance” of the US and its allies without discussing its moral implications.

The sidelining of any actual discussion of values is not a mistake. In both The Technological Republic and his various statements as a public figure, Karp has identified Western civilization principally as a project of dominance, one whose purpose—and defining characteristic—is power, with room for little else, certainly not morality. Most starkly, in an investor letter, Karp quoted Huntington once again to endorse the idea that “the rise of the West was not made possible ‘by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion … but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence.’”

Here we have the logic of tech competition laid bare. The West is the West because it excels at domination, and as we enter what Karp calls the “Software Century” (a break from the Atomic Age of the Cold War), dominance means winning the tech wars. The ability to “prevail,” Karp writes, “requires something more than moral appeal. It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software.”

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Some thinkers, such as computer scientist Cal Newport, have identified this reigning focus on technological advancement in Silicon Valley with what the anthropologist James C. Scott referred to as “high modernism,” a “muscle-bound” belief in scientific and technical progress motivated by a “supreme self-confidence” in the development of science and the control of society through technological state-building. As it applies to the theorists of tech competition, this comparison may be too flattering. The high modernists, even in Scott’s telling, believed in things; in his words, they had a “sweeping vision of how the benefits of technical and scientific progress might be applied.” It is not clear that Karp and his compatriots particularly believe in anything other than the efficient ordering of violence—as Karp outright says in his book, the “cultivation of hard power” is a necessity for the Western world’s survival that comes before anything else.

The Technological Republic invokes the specter of competition with China to defend this prioritization, warning that Xi Jinping understands the importance of hard power “in a way that those in the West, the self-proclaimed victors of history, often forget.” Indeed, he does. In fact, wrapped in the language of Western civilization though it may be, The Technological Republic betrays a remarkably CCP-like vision for the United States’ role in technological competition. Documents from the CCP’s Office of the Central National Security Commission make similarly cynical arguments to the ones that appear in The Technological Republic; one, titled “The Total National Security Paradigm,” argues that China must “seize the crux of technological innovation” such that it might “take the lead and gain an advantage,” justifying this by leaning on a simple proclamation: “We are a great power.”

Like Karp, CCP thinkers also enjoy couching their political ambitions in civilizational rhetoric. The same CCP document calls on China to seize the lead in technology in order to build up the “combined core competitiveness and national strength” of the “Chinese nation,” concluding by noting the importance of technology for China’s ability to lead a “community of common destiny” in Asia and beyond.

This is no coincidence: the dual facades of Party jargon and postmodern pastiche both serve to obscure the raw and ugly logic of zero-sum competition. Whether they call themselves technological republicans or architects of the community of common destiny, a straight line connects one to the other. In either case, we are talking about a group of people for whom there is only one measure of civilization: power.

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This is hardly the stuff of grand, age-defining civilizational opposition; it is barely even a new coat of paint on a long history of self-justifying struggles for imperial dominance. “Civilizations do not clash,” the literary critic Lydia H. Liu once wrote in a riposte to Huntington, “but empires do.” Liu’s vocabulary—of empires and imperial interests—may better describe the dynamics of the competition that both Alex Karp and his CCP counterparts are eagerly scrambling for positions in. Indeed, at one point, in what might be regarded as a Freudian slip, Karp does seem to refer to the United States as an empire, following up a claim that “the United States since its founding has always been a technological republic” with a warning that “our present advantage cannot be taken for granted,” because “the decline and fall of empires can be swift.” In any case, Karp devotes little time to detailing the actual circumstances that created this competition, preferring instead to spend much of The Technological Republic’s competition-related page count darkly intoning about the prospect of a non-Western power gaining the upper hand in technology.

But we can find a compelling account of the emergence of technological competition outlined in another book that has grabbed the attention of DC policymakers: Chris Miller’s 2022 volume Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology.

In some sense, these two books are useful complements to one another, though Chip War is a clearly presented, narratively compelling, and well-researched work of history rather than a muddled political screed. The historian of technology W. Patrick McCray has likened Chip War to other histories of imperial resource competition, including Daniel Yergin’s The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power (1990), on the global petroleum industry, and Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton: A Global History (2014). This is apt: like Yergin and Beckert’s books, Chip War shows us how the preexisting ambitions of great powers shape themselves around material realities; unlike The Prize and Empire of Cotton, however, Miller’s narrative has a more positive view of the industry it studies.

Miller is a nonresident senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, one of the major institutional boosters of US tech competition with China, and although his politics are not particularly apparent in Chip War, parts of the book’s story fit snugly into the technological republican mindset. In particular, Miller gives us an account of the Cold War that focuses on the importance of US technological supremacy in defeating the Soviet Union. Miller’s book, which spends a great deal of time detailing the pivotal role that computer chips played in the resolution of the Cold War, traces the origins of Silicon Valley back to a set of Pentagon-led public-private partnerships and outlines how the chip industry (and the tech sector more broadly) helped “bin[d] the rest of Asia, from Singapore to Taiwan to Japan, more closely to the U.S. via rapidly expanding investment links and supply chains” even as the United States itself faced military defeat in Vietnam. In Chip War’s telling, Silicon Valley helped forge “an ultra-efficient globalized division of labor” alongside the United States and its allies, which made keeping up technologically with the US—already “difficult to do during the early Cold War”—an “almost impossible” task for the Soviet Union. This, in turn, helped the United States pursue an “offset strategy” that maintained a strategic advantage in guided missiles and “force[d] the Soviets to undertake a ruinously expensive anti-missile effort in response.” By the end of the Cold War, Miller explains, “Silicon Valley had won.”

It is not surprising that Miller, a historian of the Soviet Union by training, focuses on this part of the story. But what Miller outlines is more than a historiographical intervention; it is in large part a founding myth of Silicon Valley, at least as far as its relationship with the national-security state is concerned. We see as much not only in The Technological Republic, which calls repeatedly for Silicon Valley to once again “participate in the defense of the nation,” but also in the mission statements of weapons companies like Anduril Industries and the public comments of hawkish tech groups like the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence.

This mythology makes explicit the historical basis of new attempts to enlist tech companies into the maintenance and promotion of US global primacy. Certainly, like the similarities between The Technological Republic and the CCP’s Total National Security Paradigm, it suggests a continued blurring of the lines between the US and Chinese models of tech competition and a growing merging of the incentives structuring private profit and state ambition that US authorities once criticized Chinese firms like Huawei and Tencent for participating in. But its reduction of the Cold War to essentially a technical problem, solvable by the provision and development of better weapons by for-profit companies, brings something else to mind—another account of the fall of the Soviet Union that shares a cynical imperial logic with the story of Silicon Valley winning the Cold War for the United States.

In a 2012 interview, Gleb Pavlovsky, a close former adviser to the Russian government, was asked about the Cold War roots of the “ideological worldview” that motivated Vladimir Putin—certainly no one’s idea of an erudite intellectual. “His thinking,” Pavlovsky replied, “was that in the Soviet Union, we were idiots; we had tried to build a fair society when we should have been making money.” Pavlovsky continued: “If we had made more money than the western capitalists, we could have just bought them up, or we could have created a weapon which they didn’t have. That’s all there is to it.”

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Ultimately, though, the real story of Asian tech competition is less simple than the one Miller tells. One important intervention complicating the historiography of technological development in Asia is Honghong Tinn’s new book Island Tinkerers: Innovation and Transformation in the Making of Taiwan’s Computing Industry, which offers, at least in comparison to Chip Wars, what might be considered a revisionist history of Taiwan’s role in the global chip industry.

Its central thrust is that the emergence of Taiwan’s tech manufacturing sector was, contra the Silicon Valley mythology, a matter of historical contingency and transnational cooperation, at least at the individual level. Tinn, like Miller, goes through the history of microchip titans such as Morris Chang and his Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), but unlike Chip War, Island Tinkerers focuses on all the ways in which Taiwan’s tech success stories are not solely the result of national projects. Chang, Tinn notes, was hardly a model citizen principally motivated by civilizational or even Cold War concerns; as a Chinese immigrant educated in Hong Kong and the United States, he never even lived in Taiwan until he was recruited to the island’s nascent tech sector in his mid-fifties. A major emphasis on the transnational nature of the early TSMC also jumps out at the reader: the company’s earliest technical teams received their training and experience through international networks of engineers, and major parts of the semiconductor industry’s development were supported not by technical assistance from national governments or even the private sector but through a special program from the United Nations.

Elsewhere, Island Tinkerers focuses on the ways in which top-down institutions often fail to grasp the contours of technological development. Chang’s attempt to build the dedicated foundry that would become TSMC, which would soon change the world’s model of semiconductor manufacturing, failed to raise seed money from—or even get a meeting with—most major tech companies and investors. As Tinn tells it, “only Intel and Texas Instruments welcomed [Chang] to present his ideas,” but both “eventually did not invest a dime.” Early pioneers at TSMC likewise found Taiwanese officials skeptical: in one faintly absurd passage, Tinn describes the way in which a wily government ally of TSMC had to essentially trick authorities into supporting the company by linking semiconductors to Taiwan’s research into atomic energy and nuclear reactors.

In general, Island Tinkerers suggests that it is not the case that the ordering of technological progress is a solely national endeavor, and even less so that such ordering exists most efficiently in the so-called Western world. This is an important corrective to the myths that underpin tech companies’ cooperation with and co-optation by ambitious governments in Asia or the West, and it undercuts many of the assumptions that motivate Silicon Valley’s growing refamiliarization with the American security state.

As we can see from Island Tinkerers, different narratives of tech competition can point us toward quite different approaches and outcomes. Leading proponents of competition understand this. Both within and outside the realm of technology, Xi’s regime in China, for one, has long been obsessed with the idea of “telling China’s story well,” arguing that this is key to China’s ability to set the global agenda and grow its “comprehensive national power.”

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Looking at the United States, Alex Karp echoes these sentiments, writing in The Technological Republic that, though national power may not require a focus on values or morality, it does require a “shared mythology”—perhaps a likely thing to say for someone who named their surveillance company after a magical item from a fantasy novel.

It is a common and hackneyed refrain that this sense of mythology reveals something rotten at the core of Karp’s enterprise—that Palantir itself is named after an evil object. This is not exactly the case. The “seeing stones” in Tolkien’s novel are not evil in and of themselves, powerful tools though they may be. A “palantir” is merely a mirror in which one can see what one wants to see, and it happens that when it corrupts, it does so only because it flatters a user’s preexisting will to power. As Tolkien’s stories tell us, even a person of great strength of will and mind may look into such a mirror and come out with the belief that because immense power is the only thing that can restrain evil, one should seek power first and everything else second, if at all. Characters observe this explicitly: “If all the seven stones were laid out before me now,” one says, “I should shut my eyes and put my hands in my pockets.”

Of course, for those of us who care about the ethical use of technology, about human rights or the preservation of democratic values, it may be impossible to shut our eyes. But the ways in which we look at the scope and stakes of tech competition matter nonetheless. As stories that put power first begin to dominate the tech competition discourse in the United States, as they already have in China, the difference between competitors begins to blur; when we are confronted with increasingly identical men staring into seeing stones, it is hard to see why the tech competition matters at all. “I don’t give a damn about who wins the Great Power Competition,” the human rights expert Yaqiu Wang remarked recently. “I want democracy to win. And both governments are now anti-democratic.”

Whether we call it the software age, technological republic, or community of common destiny, these are all just different ways of coloring in the same picture of a grubby struggle to get and stay ahead. Deng Xiaoping once said of China’s choice between marketization and a planned economy that it did not matter whether a cat was black or white so long as it caught mice. Between Silicon Valley’s tech capitalists and the Communist Party’s tech strategists, we wouldn’t be faulted for concluding that it does not matter whether a cat is black or white if all it does is gorge itself rapaciously.

One tires of these imperial tautologies: the West must remain dominant in tech because dominance is what the West does; the CCP must secure power in technology because that is what great powers do. On both sides of the Pacific, the emerging vision of the technological future is no vision at all. There is only grabbing at power, grasping it tightly, and waiting. In the long run, to quote Karp, we must ensure our survival through “the cultivation of hard power.” In the long run, to quote the CCP, we must “seize the crux of technological innovation.” In the long run, to quote John Maynard Keynes, “we are all dead.”