Modern cars are sensor platforms. AI chips are geopolitical assets. Rare earth magnets sit at the center of global power competition.
Understanding how the pieces within this complex reality fit together is now part of the job description for executives, policymakers, and anyone responsible for navigating risk in a more contested world.
Today, we’re launching The Exiger Exchange —— a new podcast for the people working through these issues in real time. We’re bringing you conversations with the policymakers writing the rules, the experts governments turn to, and the executives whose decisions move markets and nations.
Hosting the show is Exiger’s Chief Strategy & Global Affairs Officer Kit Conklin, a former senior advisor to the House Select Committee on the CCP who spent years on Capitol Hill working on technology and supply chain issues.
For Episode 1, Kit sat down with Dr. Chris Miller, professor at Tufts and the New York Times bestselling author of Chip War — one of the clearest thinkers anywhere on how technology, supply chains, and geopolitics intersect.
Here’s a taste of what they got into.
“Anyone who thinks this sounds like science fiction hasn’t been reading the news.”
— Chris Miller
The car as a data platform
Most of us think of our cars as cars. Chris Miller frames them differently. They’re rolling sensor arrays with cameras inside and out, LiDAR, radar, ultrasound, audio sensors, GPS, and tire pressure monitors. Individually, any one stream is mundane. Correlated together — across millions of vehicles, over time — it adds up to something far more sensitive.
A Norwegian study found a Chinese-made Nio vehicle transmitting 90% of its onboard data back to China, 70% of it encrypted. China already restricts where Teslas can drive inside its borders. Governments around the world are now working through what the equivalent guardrails should look like.
Connected infrastructure is the new attack surface
When reports surfaced that Israel had tracked Iranian leadership in part by accessing Tehran’s traffic camera systems, it underlined something Chris and Kit explore at length. Infrastructure we didn’t traditionally think of as critical, like cars, cameras, sensors, is now full of data and capable of acting on it.
That changes how companies and governments need to think about everything from procurement to data governance to what “critical infrastructure” even means.
Rare earths and the case for better visibility
China’s recent export controls on rare earth magnets and Nexperia-produced chips rippled through auto factories from Europe to Japan and India. Chris’s broader point isn’t about blame — it’s about the work ahead. Most of these chokepoints were knowable. The challenge for industry now is building the visibility, mapping, and resilience to identify the next ones before they become disruptions.
That’s harder than it sounds. Chris has spent a decade studying the semiconductor supply chain alone and still encounters single-source dependencies he didn’t know existed.
The export control debate moving through Washington right now
Last month, the House Foreign Affairs Committee marked up more than 20 bills reshaping how the U.S. controls technology exports. Kit and Chris dig into the most discussed one — the Chip Security Act, which would require advanced AI chips to verify they haven’t been diverted to restricted destinations.
They also work through the deeper strategic question. Where in the AI stack does the U.S. have the most leverage? The tools that make chips? The chips themselves? The models?
Supply chains are getting more complex, not less
There’s a recurring hope in policy circles that supply chains can be untangled and simplified. Chris’s view, grounded in years of research, is that the opposite is true. As technology advances, supply chains necessarily get more complex, because more capabilities, materials, and IP need to come from more places.
The implication is that supply chain resilience isn’t a problem you solve once. It’s a permanent capability — one that every major government and every serious company is now investing in.
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The Exiger Exchange is built for executives, policymakers, and operators navigating the new economics of risk. Each episode goes beyond the headlines and into what it means for the supply chains, technologies, and markets that run modern life.
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Welcome to The Exiger Exchange.
