You know, the big questions that only Harvard Law School graduates can answer.
Chinese semiconductor industry
- Thread starter Hendrik_2000
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Regain China citizenship is just a snap of a finger.
I'd be very surprised if they can enforce on a dime such a legally dubious and disruptive regulation, like it is a Hollywood action movie.
Anyhow, I agree, if I would be one of those people, and I or my family would be in US now, I would immediately book them the first flight to China, at least until the dust settles down.
If it is something done to scare people, as I suspect, they will proceed now with scaring actions...before some court eventually reverts them.
I see a lot of huffing and puffing around here, people should just relax. Everything the US is doing is destined to fail, there's no question about it. There has never been a case in history where a state has been able to prevent technology from proliferating to determined competitors. Venetian glassblowers were exiled to an island and executed if they tried to leave for any reason - are Venetians the only people who can blow glass? You can guess what the punishment was for smuggling silkworms out of China, did China manage to keep that to itself? Britain tried to keep its textile industry from America, how did that turn out? How long did the US manage to keep a monopoly on the most significant military technology ever developed, nuclear weapons?
What the US is doing is completely typical and the results are perfectly predictable; because where there's a will, there's a way.
The US has been flailing since 2018 and the only result has been the Chinese semiconductor industry going from strength to strength. Even in the crown jewel technology, EUV, China has been making steady progress (although that's lost in the deluge of reports posted by @tokenanalyst) and the first scanners should be ready in a scant few years. Even better, China is at the forefront of the next generation of EUV light sources and not only will it compete in the most advanced node space, it's going to commoditize semiconductors the same way it did solar panels and is currently doing with electric vehicles. It's going to drop prices through the floor and no one else will be able to compete.
What the US is doing is completely typical and the results are perfectly predictable; because where there's a will, there's a way.
The US has been flailing since 2018 and the only result has been the Chinese semiconductor industry going from strength to strength. Even in the crown jewel technology, EUV, China has been making steady progress (although that's lost in the deluge of reports posted by @tokenanalyst) and the first scanners should be ready in a scant few years. Even better, China is at the forefront of the next generation of EUV light sources and not only will it compete in the most advanced node space, it's going to commoditize semiconductors the same way it did solar panels and is currently doing with electric vehicles. It's going to drop prices through the floor and no one else will be able to compete.
Exactly, this is something that US government doesn't seem to understand. You can just buy more of the older chips to get the same effect. Maybe it will take great electricity usage and space, but you can still fully build out your data centers. I'm actually more concerned if China's cloud services can't offer certain CPUs to cloud customers, since that might drive them to AWS or Azure. But as of now, we haven't got there. I think the implication is that Chinese tech companies need to quickly make Chinese server CPUs to customers.
I'm not really sure what the impact on Biren and Horizon yet. They are not on any entity list or foreign product rules list. It's not clear to me if TSMC can still ship them the chips on order and if there is a grace period or they are completely out of the scope. It's also unclear to me how much chips have already been stocked up. I think it's obvious that they need to start working with SMIC as soon as possible, if they haven't already. SMIC's N+1/N+2 process should be sufficient for what they need. Journey 5 uses TSMC 16 nm technology. That's not exactly advanced at all.
I mean this was rushed through before midterms without any buy-in from international partners. I'm not sure how much more expansive these regulations can get without buy-in from ASML and Japanese suppliers.
Back to the AI point, here is an example of what I mean.
Kunlun 2 chips and its AI accelerator card have now been accepted by the Baidu PaddlePaddle platform. I believe Biren Tech is probably going through the same trials right now. Kunlun 2 isn't some special chips, but if you stack enough of them together, you get all the computing power you need.
BYD is investing in DSP maker Advancechip. There is a lot of potential here in the industrial product segment which US government is just completely ignoring.
I actually think that between woke Dems and MAGA, MAGA is more negotiable. Woke neolib Dems did Ukraine and escalated the semiconductor crisis at great cost to their own industry. At least Trump had the sense to back off ZTE.
For MAGA, they are easy to deal with, it's a simple exchange of interests. Woke Dems would shoot themselves in the foot and tell you it's a 5D chess move to get you to trip.
This one probably has a lot of implications. Time for the Koreans to move to using Chinese suppliers.
Probably SK Hynix and Samsung will get the license to bring in US equipment in China, but for sure it won't be free. There will be strings attached, like Chip 4 alliance, build fabs in US, ban something to China.
It is good time for China to fully step in and offer them an alternative, even for free, does not matter. If Samsung and SK can break US blackmail, it would be a huge win for China. It is already clear that without the support of his so called allies, the king is naked.
In the marathon between US - China, you win by constantly trying to trip your opponent (sanctions and bans, which will continue going forward) and/or outrun your opponent (e.g, Chips and Science Act). China's best option is also the latter; heads down, work hard, innovate, leapfrog, etc.
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