Quotes from Chris Miller

biggest use case for parallel processing: artificial intelligence. Today Nvidia's chips, largely manufactured by TSMC, are found in most advanced data centers.

We had union problems in Silicon Valley," Sporck noted. "We never had any union problems in the Orient.

Soviet spies were among the best in the business, but the semiconductor production process required more details and knowledge than even the most capable agent could steal.

So Huawei's equipment now plays an important—and in many countries, crucial—role in transmitting the world's data. Today it is one of the world's three biggest providers of equipment on cell towers, alongside Finland's Nokia and Sweden's Ericsson.

Qualcomm contributed key ideas about how to transmit more data via the radio spectrum and sold specialized chips with the computing power capable of deciphering this cacophony of signals. The company's patents are so fundamental it's impossible to make a cell phone without them.

application processors that run a smartphone's core systems. These chip designs are monumental engineering accomplishments

The investment arm of the Abu Dhabi government, Mubadala, became the primary investor

the 2010s, Huawei's HiSilicon unit was designing some of the world's most complex chips for smartphones and had become TSMC's second-largest customer. Huawei's

But the fate of AMD's production capabilities would end up shaping the chip industry—and guaranteeing that the most advanced chipmaking would take place offshore.

GlobalFoundries, as this new company that inherited AMD's fabs was known, entered

Sobchak found Putin useful both because of his connections in the security services and for his understanding of foreign economies—a mix of old skills and new.

It was better "to have too much capacity than the other way around," Chang declared. Anyone who wanted to break into the foundry business would face the full force of competition from TSMC as it raced to capture the booming market for smartphone chips.

Putin's influence in St. Petersburg, however, did not stem solely from his regulatory authority.

Within four years of the iPhone's launch, Apple was making over 60 percent of all the world's profits from smartphone sales, crushing rivals like Nokia and BlackBerry and leaving East Asian smartphone makers to compete in the low-margin market for cheap phones.

Putin's ability to maneuver between the city government, the security services, and the mafias that controlled many of the country's leading export industries.

Application processors, the electronic brain inside each smartphone, are mostly produced in Taiwan and South Korea before being sent to China for final assembly inside a phone's plastic case and glass screen.

At the same time, Putin's background in the security services facilitated his use of the law-enforcement apparatus. In his autobiography, Putin emphasized the unity of St. Petersburg's law-enforcement agencies during the early 1990s, a unity that he had helped to forge.

Putin demanded that St. Petersburg companies register with the Committee for External Relations to turn over data on their finances. Working with the tax inspectorate, Putin's analysts examined firms' tax payment records.

appears to have produced substantial tax revenue.26 One St. Petersburg city council member fumed that the scheme utilized "secret service methods" to extract payments.27 True: that was the point.

Putin discovered that his sources of financing had dried up, even as St. Petersburg's mafia bosses collected pots of money for Sobchak's opponents.29 When the votes were counted, Sobchak lost the mayoralty, and Putin lost his job. The consequences were worse for Sobchak, who faced not only the end of his political career but

Selling R&D to the government was like taking your venture capital and putting it into a savings account," Noyce declared. "Venturing is venturing; you want to take the risk.

DARPA has funded research programs on "human-machine teaming," envisioning, for example, a piloted fighter jet flying alongside several autonomous drones that are an additional set of eyes and ears for the human pilot.

In the age of AI, it's often said that data is the new oil. Yet the real limitation we face isn't the availability of data but of processing power.

With powerful friends and knowledge of underhanded methods, former spooks were a step ahead in the struggle for property amid the wreckage of the Soviet state. Some provided security for leading businessmen. Alexei Kondaurov, a former KGB general, was hired by banker-turned-oilman Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Others, such as Alexander Lebedev, built business empires spanning from telecoms to textiles. A third group, which included Vladimir Putin, worked directly in the government.