See, this was always the problem with Chinese efforts to indigenize their semiconductor industry. Each individual Chinese firm had no incentive to use Chinese suppliers, rather than their more established Western competitors. Well, guess what, the US Government has solved that coordination problem for them. Just about every Chinese company, up and down the supply chain, now has an excellent reason to buy Chinese. Sure, they’ll take years to work out the kinks, and there will be lots of chances to point and laugh in the meantime. But in the long run, the Sullivan-Blinken strategy of squeezing the Chinese chip industry might end up being one of the most counterproductive geostrategic ideas of all time.
The financial support is there so I think it’s a matter of time for local manufacturing to catch up. It’s happened in pretty much every area they’ve been in. Restricting chip imports puts higher pressure on iterating faster towards homegrown capabilities.
It would be interesting to see whether China will undercut ASML on the world market once they have competitive EUV, or wherever they’ll keep it for themselves.
And given the speed at which China generally is able to carry things out, I don’t think it will take long at all until we see true parity between Chinese chips and their US-based counterparts.
This is especially interesting in the wake of the Chinese Government’s new ban on AMD and Intel chips in government computers.
This is exactly why they want Taiwan. They can make chips, just not the greatest ones. Taiwan literally helped invent the most advanced way of growing platters around.
I was under the impression that most chips don’t need to be high end - just something good enough for the thing to work. Unless these have very high failure rates or catch on fire they should be fine, right?
For Chinas purposes ( war ) they want the best ones. You need these good chips to have missiles that can at least match your opponent. China wants to make AI powered ship killing missiles and they can’t really make them without these chip making facilities.
For the vast majority of military applications, including missiles, you do not want to use bleeding edge chip tech. You use 50nm or higher, anything with smaller feature sizes is not robust enough for a military environment.
This is exactly why they want Taiwan
The US wants to destabilize every country as long as destabilization means hatred of non US dominance institutions. It is not critical to China to take Taiwan by force, Taiwanese polling supports status quo at 80%, and so they don’t want to be come Ukraine puppet. Taiwan’s current parliament will not support stupid for next 4 years. Still, the danger of breaking US-China trade, or failing in extreme ultimatums against Europe, is ignoring of US export controls to the avantage of EU and Taiwan tech.
China does have a delete America program but it could license CUDA, and Nvidia driver compatibility for purposes of giving it away to its GPU industry. Main problems listed in OP is Nvidia’s mature ecosystem that affects AMD as well. There is a “delete America” program in China that is forced by US short sightedness. It is catching up. Drivers will get stable, and yields improve. But by tariffing energy, the US becomes a terrible place to build datacenters. Solar is perfectly fine for 24/7 datacenters in any country with decent grid because the bottleneck is daytime/peak transmission, and a small battery is enough to get to low night demand that can use grid peaker resources and spare transmission capacity. Placing datacenters in non US colony countries is path to utilizing them for entire world’s AI/computing needs, as alluded to in OP.
The shortsighted US “national security” measures look stupider the more time passes without war on China, and “delete America” progresses. US hasn’t been serious about national security in last 40 years. Just in funneling the most money possible to oligarchy with little military value returned. Naval warfare/force projection is dead strategy. China’s wealth (PPP) advantage and military production rate/value is well ahead of US, and as a manufacturing power, can be increased as well. Its aims of economic abundance are clearly more humanist than US approach, and clearly more welcome to anyone/nation not corrupt and evil.
OP issues may be real, but if China were forced to improve the stability/ecosystem of domestic options, they can right now. China has banned Nvidia (and intel/amd) in certain sectors this week. Bosch and other German Auto sectors are investing huge in China manufacturing, and to compete in Chinese supply chain. Chinese EV, self driving, and robotics are well ahead of west even with sanctions, so that sector seems safe. Betting on China dominance 5-10 years from now is a bet you can give 10:1 odds on. Nuclear annihilation means you won’t have to pay. Time is on China’s side.
wHaTaBoUt the USA?!
Your post sounds like AI slob. Taiwan Ukraines puppet? I just stopped there…
The example of Ukraine is discouraging to any “Taiwan militarist extremism”. What instigates an invasion or blockade of Taiwan by China is Taiwan declaring its acceptance of NATO membership, and US missile bases, or 51st state./US territory.
Both the Taiwanese population and current parliamentary majority are against the path of national suicide that Ukraine has taken. US promise to bomb TSMC themselves, and the failure to defeat Russia, in order to focus on creating war in Taiwan is not going to have short term success in convincing Taiwanese to follow Ukraine’s stupidity. Ukraine was “blessed” with extremely hateful nationalists with ww2 and prior grudges against Russia, and an opponent that seemed to be weakening. Fortunately, Trump threatening to force Taiwan to pay for US protection instead of fomenting nazi-like extremism, with cash/weapons support of such groups, cannot possibly be successful in instigating war.
Greatest hits
- don’t want to be come Ukraine puppet.
- current parliament will not support stupid
- China does have a delete America program ( Certified Delete America Program is my new flair )
- Naval warfare/force projection is dead strategy.
- Its aims of economic abundance are clearly more humanist than US approach
- Nuclear annihilation means you won’t have to pay.
- Time is on China’s side.
The chinese understand that this is a matter of national security, as can be seen by the US limiting their access to high quality chips. This power over other nations production shouldn’t be there.
