7 ms·

China is quietly reducing its reliance on foreign chip technology

58 points by DyslexicAtheist 3y ago

coldtea 3y ago
Given the enmity it sees from those chip supplying foreign countries, it makes total sense.
- WhereIsTheTruth 3y ago
  This is a FUD article Remember last year: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/11/how-huawei-made-a-cutting-edge-chip-in-china-and-surprised-the-us/2/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/11/how-h... There is no "quietly", China is proud of it, they are building a domestic industry Also remember of this retaliation WRT trade sanctions: https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3249253/why-does-china-ban-outside-access-its-advanced-rare-earth-magnet-technology https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3249253/why-...
  - FooBarWidget 3y ago
    Well there is quietly. They are quiet about technical progress. They will only boast when they have something to show. SMEE and SMIC haven't posted substantial updates for years because they don't want to draw the attention of more US sanctions, but under the hood they're working hard to expel foreign technology. You also haven't heard about any progress in Huawei until the phone came out.
    - gamepsys 3y ago
      I always assumed the sudden leaps forward were a combination of having government funding (no need build hype to sell to VCs), corporate espionage, and an unconcerned attitude towards international intellectual property law. Not say no hard work was put into it, but from my perspective that have certain advantages to leverage while doing the work.
      - KerrAvon 3y ago
        Yes, this was always where things were going to end up. It was completely predictable. All those foreign companies with local partnerships are going to be very sad. Thanks for the money and education, yankees, go home now. And they have critical mass now, so it accelerates every time the west closes off some of our technology to them. What did American executives think was going to happen when they got involved with a communist dictatorship on the dictatorship’s terms? (Rhetorical question; they were greedy and wanted short-term profit above all else.)
        FooBarWidget 3y ago
        Predictable? In the old days people were yelling left and right that Chinese can't make advanced technology. Then they yelled that they can only copy. Even today many people (including in this very HN thread even...) are still saying that Chinese can only copy and can't possibly make real advanced stuff. China was in fact contend with the deal of being so far behind in semiconductors as long as they can import them. They could have invested even more in domestic semiconductor development, but chose not to because they assumed that they could just import what they wanted. 10 years ago, the Chinese govt set a target to produce 70% semiconductors domestically, but the Chinese industry didn't cooperate at all because of how easy and cost-efficient it was to import. With these sanctions, they now face an existential threat and thus they must progress. Yes maybe that comes with some spying and copying, but it seems ludicrous to me to focus so much on it. You deprive a person from his source of food and then when, out of desperation, he starts to steal, you complain about his bad morals? That outcome should be the more predictable one.
        hakfoo 3y ago
        We don't even need to get into "desperation" arguments. I support their efforts to copy and extend 100%. Western states deserve to have their asses handed to them on this. This was a double-whammy of stupid assumptions: that the rest of the world-- with different backgrounds and needs-- would forever accept the "let's legislate that water runs uphill" IP narrative, and that other countries were willing to remain trade vassals forever. If it takes industrial-scale Chinese copying to force technology to march forward, I'm all for it. I also love the tendency to cast this as moral argument-- "they're StEaLiNg our tech." If anyone is immoral in this situation, it's the IP holders. They're bottling up the very progress of mankind to ensure they can make their quarterly sacrifices to the almighty Market God, and we've just normalized it here. I hope that their attitude towards intellectual property gets ever laxer and shows us a new way forward.
    - eunos 3y ago
      SMIC is a public company, they are releasing quarterly and annually reports and outlooks just like other public companies but they are mostly in Mandarin. SMEE I heard will do IPO as well so we can expect similar releases. Example https://twitter.com/tphuang/status/1757448248443257038 https://twitter.com/tphuang/status/1757448248443257038
    - marcosdumay 3y ago
      > They will only boast when they have something to show. Oh, how to fail to acknowledge a culture... China never boasted work in progress. And since their largest companies are tied to the government, I don't think they'll be tempted to do that any soon.
  - adrian_b 3y ago
    It is done much more quietly than before. For instance, after the many "sanctions" imposed by USA China has stopped submitting benchmark results from their top supercomputers, to make more uncertain their true capabilities. Also Huawei has no longer published detailed descriptions of their new smartphone chipsets, like they were doing when they could still manufacture them at TSMC. The so-called "sanctions" used by USA are not real sanctions. Real sanctions are conditioned by political demands, like requesting guarantees from China that they will not attempt to expand outside their current territory, or that they will treat fairly their minorities. The USA "sanctions" are just anti-competitive measures designed to sabotage the competitors of US companies like Qualcomm and Micron and they have been introduced precisely when those companies were in serious danger to be overtaken in the market by their Chinese competitors. The principal effect of the USA "sanctions" has been to ensure higher prices all over the world for certain consumer products, mainly for smartphones and SSDs. Their military effects are negligible.
    - eunos 3y ago
      >Huawei has no longer published detailed descriptions There are detailed descriptions, but it's not widely released in English globally.
      - DiogenesKynikos 3y ago
        The Huawei P60 Pro did not advertise its 5G capability, even inside China. It's basically an Easter egg: there's no 5G icon in the UI, but when you run a network speed test, you realize that the phone is connecting to 5G.
whimsicalism 3y ago
https://archive.is/tNJfv https://archive.is/tNJfv
Almondsetat 3y ago
"Quitely" for an Economist reader perhaps. In the tech sector we are bombarded by news of new fabs and manufcaturing achievements from China
- throwbadubadu 3y ago
  Yes, funny also in the light of constant threats of embargos and sanctions and what else.. Also funny if you think like: quietly! Not like here, first shouting out loud and announcing and promising whatsoever.. and then later see what's really delivered? :D
- slickrick216 3y ago
  It’s amazing what happens when you just steal innovation from the rest of the world and are aided by a cabal of globalist treason merchants called politicians selling out their entire civilisation for a quick buck.
  - chucke1992 3y ago
    But it just means there is no innovation in China.
    - m2024 3y ago
      No one who has been to China would ever think that. It's an awe-inspiring country with massive cities and fascinating people.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - helpfulContrib 3y ago
    [dead]
  - m2mdas2 3y ago
    In a sense I agree with you, there is definitely stealing involved. At the same time I offer you a different POV. Imagine you are a parent of a meritorious child, above average student you may say. You know that your child will grow more if he gets access to the books of the nearby library. But you can't get the books because the library is controlled by elites and denying access (or asking higher price) to you because you are a peasant. What will you do to solve the issue minimizing the damage? If people put to a back in the wall situation thousands pages of moral teachings becomes mute.
roland35 3y ago
I don't think it's surprising that a superpower country realizes that semiconductors are a critical national security level resource
yieldcrv 3y ago
We got Hawaii catalyzed by a trade war with China in the 1890s, American entrepreneurs in Hawaii relied on exports to US and China, but both countries had put tariffs on anything outside their unions, something solved magically if one were within one of the unions so Dole chose to run a coup de tat in Hawaii with the US Navy stationed there and even though the current US President was very annoyed and appalled by this, his term ran out and the next guy said Dole could run it Any other pacific islands that a couple American entrepreneurs are frustrated by?
laydn 3y ago
Sanctions by countries who developed a certain technology, appear to always result in the country which was sanctioned to develop that technology in some timeframe, depending on the complexity. Was there any case of a "successful" sanction in history? Or is holding back a country for a few years (or decades depending on the tech) considered a success?
- giobox 3y ago
  There are a fair few books ("Chip War") on this topic that make the case the US was relatively successful at keeping some critical advanced semi-conductor tech out of China and other less agreeable States for decades between the 70s and early 2000s. The commonly cited examples are America's "smart" weapons/bombs etc having a significant edge for a long time, see the ease with which US warplanes took out huge swaths of Iraqi infrastructure in Gulf War 1 in the early 90s, again largely thanks to superior precision weapons and stealth etc, which in many cases were the products of superior semi-conductor technologies. "Chip War" to some extent makes the argument it's in the more recent times we've seen US legislators lack of maintaining as much interest in export controls that has lead to the erosion of this advantage, not that controls don't work at all per se. The export controls work in some cases not because the facts or design of the tech is unknown; the issue is that many cutting edge technologies need an entire complex ecosystem of businesses, people, production and supply lines to be present to work too - it's often this part that becomes very hard to simply replicate - see Taiwan's huge lead in chip manufacturing despite being in a hugely politically unstable geographic location. It's taking the USA decades to try and bring that kind of manufacturing capability at the cutting edge back to the US, and the US still can't compete with the scale Taiwan can produce the latest chips at. > https://a.co/d/guYgEsG https://a.co/d/guYgEsG
  - eunos 3y ago
    Chip war isn't written by a subject matter expert so I highly doubt the veracity of the content
    - giobox 3y ago
prng2021 3y ago
I hope no one is impressed with their chip advancements. Just Google “China IP theft”. Their government has stolen countless corporate secrets to build their chip sector. They’re in a league of their own compared to any other country when it comes to corporate espionage.
- Goodroo 3y ago
  You are saying that if Nigeria or Burundi or Mexico or Indonesia engaged in IP theft,they could build a competitive chip sector ?
  - prng2021 3y ago
    Obviously not. I’m saying China wouldn’t be able to make use of their unlimited government funding and rare earth minerals without stealing innovation from the US.
Giorgi 3y ago
The nerve on this article, they went ahead and compared nVidia to Huawei. Yeah, maybe they will came up something IoT capable, but that's about it. Communism never works, especially when you want to create something high tech, not just plastic crap.
- eunos 3y ago
  Lmao nVidia explicitly wrote that Huawei is a competitor in AI space. https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2024/02/23/business/china-nvidia-huawei-competitor-ai-chips-intl-hnk/index.html https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2024/02/23/busi...
- Vt71fcAqt7 3y ago
  What is Communism?
- PathfinderBot 3y ago
  China's not communist anymore.
eunos 3y ago
Remain to be seen whether complete supply chain is possible for semiconductors. However should they success this mean that Chinese supercomputer makers will not be hesitating to supply those to countries in US blacklist. Imagine Russia and Iran having access to hundreds Petaflops computers or even exascale! Maybe it's pricier even with less margin than US offerings and more difficult to use, but that'd least of their concern.
- someotherperson 3y ago
  > Imagine Russia and Iran having access to hundreds Petaflops computers or even exascale! Oh no? Seriously though, so what if they do?
  - nexus6 3y ago
    Further advanced research into atomic weapons would be one worry.
    - eunos 3y ago
      That might be the case for Iran, but for Russia?
    - nitwit005 3y ago
      Given that most atomic weapons were created at a time with very limited computing power, it doesn't appear to be a requirement. Iran can likely just ask Russia for modern missile and nuclear technology in their current relationship.
  - throwup238 3y ago
    The single biggest customer for supercomputers is the Department of Energy which uses them for simulating nuclear weapons. That's how our nuclear arsenal is maintained. Having access to that computing power would make it easier for main MAD foe to maintain their arsenal, among simulating tons of other things for aerospace and defense. There's just no good reason to let them have that capability.
- 3y ago

coldtea 3y ago

Given the enmity it sees from those chip supplying foreign countries, it makes total sense.

WhereIsTheTruth 3y ago
This is a FUD article Remember last year: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/11/how-huawei-made-a-cutting-edge-chip-in-china-and-surprised-the-us/2/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/11/how-h... There is no "quietly", China is proud of it, they are building a domestic industry Also remember of this retaliation WRT trade sanctions: https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3249253/why-does-china-ban-outside-access-its-advanced-rare-earth-magnet-technology https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3249253/why-...
- FooBarWidget 3y ago
  Well there is quietly. They are quiet about technical progress. They will only boast when they have something to show. SMEE and SMIC haven't posted substantial updates for years because they don't want to draw the attention of more US sanctions, but under the hood they're working hard to expel foreign technology. You also haven't heard about any progress in Huawei until the phone came out.
  - gamepsys 3y ago
    I always assumed the sudden leaps forward were a combination of having government funding (no need build hype to sell to VCs), corporate espionage, and an unconcerned attitude towards international intellectual property law. Not say no hard work was put into it, but from my perspective that have certain advantages to leverage while doing the work.
    - KerrAvon 3y ago
      Yes, this was always where things were going to end up. It was completely predictable. All those foreign companies with local partnerships are going to be very sad. Thanks for the money and education, yankees, go home now. And they have critical mass now, so it accelerates every time the west closes off some of our technology to them. What did American executives think was going to happen when they got involved with a communist dictatorship on the dictatorship’s terms? (Rhetorical question; they were greedy and wanted short-term profit above all else.)
      - FooBarWidget 3y ago
        Predictable? In the old days people were yelling left and right that Chinese can't make advanced technology. Then they yelled that they can only copy. Even today many people (including in this very HN thread even...) are still saying that Chinese can only copy and can't possibly make real advanced stuff. China was in fact contend with the deal of being so far behind in semiconductors as long as they can import them. They could have invested even more in domestic semiconductor development, but chose not to because they assumed that they could just import what they wanted. 10 years ago, the Chinese govt set a target to produce 70% semiconductors domestically, but the Chinese industry didn't cooperate at all because of how easy and cost-efficient it was to import. With these sanctions, they now face an existential threat and thus they must progress. Yes maybe that comes with some spying and copying, but it seems ludicrous to me to focus so much on it. You deprive a person from his source of food and then when, out of desperation, he starts to steal, you complain about his bad morals? That outcome should be the more predictable one.
        hakfoo 3y ago
        We don't even need to get into "desperation" arguments. I support their efforts to copy and extend 100%. Western states deserve to have their asses handed to them on this. This was a double-whammy of stupid assumptions: that the rest of the world-- with different backgrounds and needs-- would forever accept the "let's legislate that water runs uphill" IP narrative, and that other countries were willing to remain trade vassals forever. If it takes industrial-scale Chinese copying to force technology to march forward, I'm all for it. I also love the tendency to cast this as moral argument-- "they're StEaLiNg our tech." If anyone is immoral in this situation, it's the IP holders. They're bottling up the very progress of mankind to ensure they can make their quarterly sacrifices to the almighty Market God, and we've just normalized it here. I hope that their attitude towards intellectual property gets ever laxer and shows us a new way forward.
  - eunos 3y ago
    SMIC is a public company, they are releasing quarterly and annually reports and outlooks just like other public companies but they are mostly in Mandarin. SMEE I heard will do IPO as well so we can expect similar releases. Example https://twitter.com/tphuang/status/1757448248443257038 https://twitter.com/tphuang/status/1757448248443257038
  - marcosdumay 3y ago
    > They will only boast when they have something to show. Oh, how to fail to acknowledge a culture... China never boasted work in progress. And since their largest companies are tied to the government, I don't think they'll be tempted to do that any soon.
- adrian_b 3y ago
  It is done much more quietly than before. For instance, after the many "sanctions" imposed by USA China has stopped submitting benchmark results from their top supercomputers, to make more uncertain their true capabilities. Also Huawei has no longer published detailed descriptions of their new smartphone chipsets, like they were doing when they could still manufacture them at TSMC. The so-called "sanctions" used by USA are not real sanctions. Real sanctions are conditioned by political demands, like requesting guarantees from China that they will not attempt to expand outside their current territory, or that they will treat fairly their minorities. The USA "sanctions" are just anti-competitive measures designed to sabotage the competitors of US companies like Qualcomm and Micron and they have been introduced precisely when those companies were in serious danger to be overtaken in the market by their Chinese competitors. The principal effect of the USA "sanctions" has been to ensure higher prices all over the world for certain consumer products, mainly for smartphones and SSDs. Their military effects are negligible.
  - eunos 3y ago
    >Huawei has no longer published detailed descriptions There are detailed descriptions, but it's not widely released in English globally.
    - DiogenesKynikos 3y ago
      The Huawei P60 Pro did not advertise its 5G capability, even inside China. It's basically an Easter egg: there's no 5G icon in the UI, but when you run a network speed test, you realize that the phone is connecting to 5G.

whimsicalism 3y ago

https://archive.is/tNJfv https://archive.is/tNJfv

Almondsetat 3y ago

"Quitely" for an Economist reader perhaps. In the tech sector we are bombarded by news of new fabs and manufcaturing achievements from China

throwbadubadu 3y ago
Yes, funny also in the light of constant threats of embargos and sanctions and what else.. Also funny if you think like: quietly! Not like here, first shouting out loud and announcing and promising whatsoever.. and then later see what's really delivered? :D
slickrick216 3y ago
It’s amazing what happens when you just steal innovation from the rest of the world and are aided by a cabal of globalist treason merchants called politicians selling out their entire civilisation for a quick buck.
- chucke1992 3y ago
  But it just means there is no innovation in China.
  - m2024 3y ago
    No one who has been to China would ever think that. It's an awe-inspiring country with massive cities and fascinating people.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- helpfulContrib 3y ago
  [dead]
- m2mdas2 3y ago
  In a sense I agree with you, there is definitely stealing involved. At the same time I offer you a different POV. Imagine you are a parent of a meritorious child, above average student you may say. You know that your child will grow more if he gets access to the books of the nearby library. But you can't get the books because the library is controlled by elites and denying access (or asking higher price) to you because you are a peasant. What will you do to solve the issue minimizing the damage? If people put to a back in the wall situation thousands pages of moral teachings becomes mute.

roland35 3y ago

I don't think it's surprising that a superpower country realizes that semiconductors are a critical national security level resource

yieldcrv 3y ago

We got Hawaii catalyzed by a trade war with China in the 1890s, American entrepreneurs in Hawaii relied on exports to US and China, but both countries had put tariffs on anything outside their unions, something solved magically if one were within one of the unions so Dole chose to run a coup de tat in Hawaii with the US Navy stationed there and even though the current US President was very annoyed and appalled by this, his term ran out and the next guy said Dole could run it Any other pacific islands that a couple American entrepreneurs are frustrated by?

laydn 3y ago

Sanctions by countries who developed a certain technology, appear to always result in the country which was sanctioned to develop that technology in some timeframe, depending on the complexity. Was there any case of a "successful" sanction in history? Or is holding back a country for a few years (or decades depending on the tech) considered a success?

giobox 3y ago
There are a fair few books ("Chip War") on this topic that make the case the US was relatively successful at keeping some critical advanced semi-conductor tech out of China and other less agreeable States for decades between the 70s and early 2000s. The commonly cited examples are America's "smart" weapons/bombs etc having a significant edge for a long time, see the ease with which US warplanes took out huge swaths of Iraqi infrastructure in Gulf War 1 in the early 90s, again largely thanks to superior precision weapons and stealth etc, which in many cases were the products of superior semi-conductor technologies. "Chip War" to some extent makes the argument it's in the more recent times we've seen US legislators lack of maintaining as much interest in export controls that has lead to the erosion of this advantage, not that controls don't work at all per se. The export controls work in some cases not because the facts or design of the tech is unknown; the issue is that many cutting edge technologies need an entire complex ecosystem of businesses, people, production and supply lines to be present to work too - it's often this part that becomes very hard to simply replicate - see Taiwan's huge lead in chip manufacturing despite being in a hugely politically unstable geographic location. It's taking the USA decades to try and bring that kind of manufacturing capability at the cutting edge back to the US, and the US still can't compete with the scale Taiwan can produce the latest chips at. > https://a.co/d/guYgEsG https://a.co/d/guYgEsG
- eunos 3y ago
  Chip war isn't written by a subject matter expert so I highly doubt the veracity of the content
  - giobox 3y ago

prng2021 3y ago

I hope no one is impressed with their chip advancements. Just Google “China IP theft”. Their government has stolen countless corporate secrets to build their chip sector. They’re in a league of their own compared to any other country when it comes to corporate espionage.

Goodroo 3y ago
You are saying that if Nigeria or Burundi or Mexico or Indonesia engaged in IP theft,they could build a competitive chip sector ?
- prng2021 3y ago
  Obviously not. I’m saying China wouldn’t be able to make use of their unlimited government funding and rare earth minerals without stealing innovation from the US.

Giorgi 3y ago

The nerve on this article, they went ahead and compared nVidia to Huawei. Yeah, maybe they will came up something IoT capable, but that's about it. Communism never works, especially when you want to create something high tech, not just plastic crap.

eunos 3y ago
Lmao nVidia explicitly wrote that Huawei is a competitor in AI space. https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2024/02/23/business/china-nvidia-huawei-competitor-ai-chips-intl-hnk/index.html https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2024/02/23/busi...
Vt71fcAqt7 3y ago
What is Communism?
PathfinderBot 3y ago
China's not communist anymore.

eunos 3y ago

Remain to be seen whether complete supply chain is possible for semiconductors. However should they success this mean that Chinese supercomputer makers will not be hesitating to supply those to countries in US blacklist. Imagine Russia and Iran having access to hundreds Petaflops computers or even exascale! Maybe it's pricier even with less margin than US offerings and more difficult to use, but that'd least of their concern.

someotherperson 3y ago
> Imagine Russia and Iran having access to hundreds Petaflops computers or even exascale! Oh no? Seriously though, so what if they do?
- nexus6 3y ago
  Further advanced research into atomic weapons would be one worry.
  - eunos 3y ago
    That might be the case for Iran, but for Russia?
  - nitwit005 3y ago
    Given that most atomic weapons were created at a time with very limited computing power, it doesn't appear to be a requirement. Iran can likely just ask Russia for modern missile and nuclear technology in their current relationship.
- throwup238 3y ago
  The single biggest customer for supercomputers is the Department of Energy which uses them for simulating nuclear weapons. That's how our nuclear arsenal is maintained. Having access to that computing power would make it easier for main MAD foe to maintain their arsenal, among simulating tons of other things for aerospace and defense. There's just no good reason to let them have that capability.
3y ago