People, please stop the Chinese grievance on this thread. This is truly embarrassing to watch and just not relevant to the thread.
Anyways, I've spent more time just examining the consequences of some of the guidelines. Read through Dylan Patel's take on what the ruling means and some others.
Our friend
@tinrobert has an article up about this
I appreciate the commentary in there. It made things very clear that Chinese customers do have some time to stock up on their A100/H100 orders. That should help the firms who had been waiting on their already placed orders and give them to move on.
He also pointed out domestic competition like Biren Technology and Moffett AI. Here is the thing, some people (like Dylan Patel) believes that the current ruling will prohibit TSMC from building chips for Biren Technology. I'm not sure exactly about that. I think we will have to wait and see. Regardless, I would expect there to be a small grace period like in the case of Nvidia, where TSMC can fulfill initial batch or large batch of chips as long as it's done in a few months. Even Huawei got time to stock up. Such an arrangement will probably satisfy both US gov't and Chinese industry. This should given Biren enough of a stock to get at least the plugged in and connected with its initial customers, while they work with SMIC for their next chip.
Kunlun 2 and some other lower power AI chips we saw recently don't crack 600 TOPS, so are probably not restricted at all. I think it's prudent for them to do their next generation chips with SMIC.
And reading through this
It seems like the ban does not cover server chips like Yitian-710 or other ones that Alibaba Pintouge has developed. Although, it would seem to me that they should stock up on as many of the advanced chips as they could (like Huawei did) and design their future CPUs with SMIC.
I don't expect SMIC's N+1/N+2 process to have really high yields in the beginning. But due to having a captive market, they can probably charge a lot of money to work with anyone. Or maybe the gov't can subsidize these purchases.
Long term, there is always the fear that America will ban all desktop, auto and smartphone chips. It's important for them to probably ramp up those advanced node fab production.
Another thing they should do is to work at providing replacement options to American tools at Samsung and TSMC. After all, both of them can buy EUVs. So if they have Chinese tools, they could continue to make chips for Chinese design shops.
