I'm cautious with Asianometry. I watched some about a year ago and he wasn't completely accurate. I don't remember which videos now, but letting people know they should consume more than just Asianometry to corroborate facts.
When describing someone who does vulgarization videos about the semi-conductor industry, "he wasn't completely accurate" seems like praising with faint damnation!
That ARM video is useful because it somewhat ties together lots of things in a short-ish video. But I hate the breathless style and the video confuses and mistakes many things. Also what's the point of that silly [the iPhone is british, Fitbit is british, DJI drones are British...]?
In the end it is not about the semiconductor business - just hits several aspects of it at the periphery.
Chip War focuses a lot on the personalities and comparatively little on the business/industry itself. It provides an entertaining read, I guess, but especially in the second half, I found myself reading on just to finish the book, rather than out of a desire/expectation to get informed.
Some representative paragraphs from the book. Some people probably like this style, but it's not for me.
> In 1985, Taiwan's powerful minister K. T. Li called Morris Chang into his office in Taipei. Nearly two decades had passed since Li had helped convince Texas Instruments to build its first semiconductor facility on the island. In the twenty years since then, Li had forged close ties with Texas Instrument's leaders, visiting Pat Haggerty and Morris Chang whenever he was in the U.S. and convincing other electronics firms to follow TI and open factories in Taiwan. In 1985, he hired Chang to lead Taiwan's chip industry. "We want to promote a semiconductor industry in Taiwan," he told Chang. "Tell me," he continued, "how much money you need."
...
> Lee Byung-Chul could make a profit selling almost anything. Born in 1910, just a year after Jack Simplot, Lee launched his business career in March 1938, a time when his native Korea was part of Japan's empire, at war with China and soon with the United States. Lee's first products were dried fish and vegetables, which he gathered from Korea and shipped to northern China to feed Japan's war machine. Korea was an impoverished backwater, with no industry or technology, but Lee was already dreaming of building a business that would be "big, strong, and eternal," he declared. He would turn Samsung into a semiconductor superpower thanks to two influential allies: America's chip industry and the South Korean state. A key part of Silicon Valley's strategy to outmaneuver the Japanese was to find cheaper sources of supply in Asia. Lee decided this was a role Samsung could easily play.
...
> Vladimir Vetrov was a KGB spy, but his life felt more like a Chekhov story than a James Bond film. His KGB work was bureaucratic, his mistress far from a supermodel, and his wife more affectionate toward her shih tzu puppies than toward him. By the end of the 1970s, Vetrov's career, and his life, had hit a dead end. He despised his desk job and was ignored by his bosses. He detested his wife, who was having an affair with one of his friends. For recreation, he escaped to his log cabin in a village north of Moscow, which was so rustic that there was no electricity. Or he'd simply stay in Moscow and get drunk.
Adding that if you prefer to read (since the question is about best books), asianometry's patreon includes transcripts. Plus it's always good to support someone doing good work.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKtxx9TnH76SXumAiJX3N7Y36...