Whoever can become independent of the other’s chips will win. Who will remove the other first from its supply chain? I have my guesses but it will be interesting to watch it play out.
Given how US efforts for reshoring chip production are going, I think we know who’s going to win this race.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Years after Uncle Sam ordered US telecommunications providers to rip and replace Huawei kit from their networks, Beijing is telling telcos in China to strip out American-made chips.
On Friday, Chinese officials reportedly ordered its top telecoms players to eliminate foreign semiconductors — primarily those from Intel and AMD — within the next three years.
At issue were concerns that, due to Chinese laws mandating the sharing of info with Beijing, Huawei and ZTE could be forced to place backdoors in its equipment to facilitate intelligence gathering operations.
However, it’s not clear at this point what, if any, support will be provided to its telcos to offset the cost of replacing foreign chips with homegrown silicon.
China’s shift from Western tech has intensified in response to American trade restrictions designed to deny the Middle Kingdom access to leading-edge processor technologies required for AI, as well as the chipmaking equipment necessary to achieve self sufficiency in the near term.
Despite these efforts, Chinese companies, including Huawei and Semiconductor Manufacturing International Co (aka SMIC) have been remarkably successful at building relatively high-end silicon.
The original article contains 449 words, the summary contains 181 words. Saved 60%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Ah great as the countries silo themselves. I can it see bad things in the future. When everyone was dependent on each other nobody wanted to rock the boat.
Trump rocked the boat and Biden did nothing except double down.
Weren’t all the backdoors rocking the boat?
How do they expect them to replace Intel and AMD processors? And with what?
with an x86 license
doesn’t that still mean they are dependent on the West technically?
In it’s roots, yes. But the architecture isn’t banned, just the chips. As an analogy, China can make its own internal combustion engines and not buy Ford cars.
I meant, if they require a license to keep making x86 chips, what’s to stop Intel/the US from revoking it later on?
At this point the licencing is only about Intel getting money, not about China being allowed to produce the chips, me thinks
Long overdue. And I don’t simply mean that from security perspective or as some retaliation to the Huawei ban. Having self-sufficient digital infrastructure should be a top priority for any country that wants to be independent and can afford it. This is also why the Huawei ban was the right move for our (I’m in the West) infrastructure.
I’m glad my country went with Huawei. It is good to have cheap alternatives to Western technology and the West is forcing China to develop in this area, so it is a win for everyone.
