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US revokes Intel, Qualcomm licenses to sell chips to Huawei
- simonblack 2y agoFoot, meet bullet. The US semiconductor companies need Huawei more than Huawei needs the US semi companies. Say goodbye to those companies while you can. They won't be with us for very much longer. You don't last very long when you can't sell to the World's biggest market.
- blackeyeblitzar 2y agoIs that market really relevant? They’re going to go their own way anyways. So if you’re a western government, you might as well hurt the CCP as much as possible for now. Also the Chinese economy is falling apart and I don’t know if their demand for goods will last.
- somenameforme 2y agoHere [1] are Intel's financial reports. Check out the 2023 annual report, page 86. China is their single largest source of revenue, making up 27% (and growing) of all revenue. China's GDP growth was for 2023 was 5.2%, which was slightly above published expectations. They definitely have some real estate issues to sort out, but when the largest economy in the world, by PPP at least, is having some of the highest growth rates in the world, it is probably just slightly premature to claim that their economy is falling apart. [1] - https://www.intc.com/financial-info/financial-results https://www.intc.com/financial-info/financial-results
- questhimay 2y agothe 5.2% is just a figure the bureau of statistics made up to make sure they hit xi Jing ping's goal of 5% for the year. even china bull Ray Dalio thinks China in a lost decade or more https://www.forbes.com/sites/williampesek/2024/03/29/ray-dalio-fears-china-faces-lost-decade---we-should-listen/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/williampesek/2024/03/29/ray-dal...
- somenameforme 2y agoGDP growth figures published by e.g. the IMF are not just verbatim replications of what a country says. It comes from extensive analysis, verification, cross referencing against other data, and validation. It's why IMF data will often differ not only from what a country says, but even from what other organizations such as e.g. the World Bank or UN might say, as the latter are also independently carrying out their own similar processes. But all figures tend to fall pretty closely, because under this scrutiny it's practically impossible to meaningfully fudge things.
- refurb 2y agoChina needs 8-9% growth for 20 years to get to the GDP per capita of US/Western Europe. 5% isn’t going to cut it. It has a massive overhang of real estate and big demographic headwinds. The middle income trap is looking more and more a possibility.
- DiogenesKynikos 2y agoChina's population is more than that of the US and Europe combined. China doesn't need to reach the same GDP/capita as the West in order to attain the same level of economic power. Even with only 50% of Western GDP/capita, the Chinese economy would as large as the US and EU combined. > The middle income trap is looking more and more a possibility. The "middle income trap" is related to an inability to move up the value chain. Given that China already leads in many growing high-tech sectors, it already looks like China has blown past the middle income trap.
- refurb 2y agoBut nobody cares about who has the “largest” economy if the GDP per capita is middle income. China has absolutely not blow past the middle income trap. 600M live on less than $140/month according to Chinese statistics. If they hope to get anywhere close to the standard of living of developed countries they will need to quadruple the size of their economy which even at 9% would take 2 decades.
- DiogenesKynikos 2y agoChina's GDP/capita is about 12,000 USD, which is somewhere between Mexico and Poland. Average monthly income in China is about 1400 USD, which is 10x the level you cited. The middle income trap is about countries getting stuck, because they are unable to transition from cheap manufacturing to higher-value-added industries. China has already moved into high-tech sectors in a big way, so it looks like the middle income trap is already irrelevant for China.
- foverzar 2y ago> Also the Chinese economy is falling apart Why is it supposed to fall apart exactly?
- NemoNobody 2y agoChina beat itself. By 2100 there will be only 750 billion Chinese people. That's an irreversible problem that means we are essentially seeing peak China now. https://chinapower.csis.org/china-demographics-challenges/ https://chinapower.csis.org/china-demographics-challenges/
- MaxPock 2y agoAll western countries have low TFRs . I mean ,Korea, Japan and Taiwan have worse replacement rates than China .
- tw04 2y agoGiven it won’t be the world’s biggest market in the next year or two, I think the rumors of the US semiconductor’s demise are likely grossly exaggerated. https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-update-2022 https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-update-2022
- rjzzleep 2y agoTalking heads points. China isn’t the most powerful economy because of its headcount compared to India. But India is finally doing what it needs to build the necessary infrastructure. Unfortunately for you all the saber rattling towards India, Russia and China means that India too has been spending a lot of effort on building domestic infrastructure, working on swift alternatives, container shipping insurance, domestic high tech production etc. Just like they forced visa and Mastercard to either run on India infrastructure or pull out, they are working hard to make their own economy sanction proof from the west. As night follows day you’ll either have to accept India as an equal or risk loosing that market as well.
- foverzar 2y ago> Just like they forced visa and Mastercard to either run on India infrastructure or pull out Nicely done. Russia did a similar thing a while back, so when visa and mastercard had to kill their business in Russia all of the credit cards inside the country remained undisrupted. I was skeptical back in the day over the whole engineering and integration of NSPK (national system for payment cards), but seeing it doing its thing was an awe.
- questhimay 2y agoworld's biggest market by population perhaps, but out of the 1.3B population for China, 700M of them make less than $100/month. 200M makes around $1000/month, but with the recent wage cuts across industries, more like $500/month for most middle class.
- foverzar 2y agoHow much can they actually spend after paying all the essential and quality of life wages?
- refurb 2y agoOn less than $100 USD per month? Not much.
- MaxPock 2y agoYou are telling us western companies that report record sales in China are in cahoots with the CCP to fudge numbers ? When Mercedes and VW say that they sell more cars in China than in the US and Europe,it must be a huge psyop ..
- jambutters 2y agoYikes, I want more competition as a consumer not less. I hope they will produce good chips of their own then. Nuts how this just keeps blowing up after trump started it
- knallfrosch 2y agoI'm still mad they cut Huawei off from Google Play. It's actually crazy how good my HuaweiP30 was before I broke it.
- izacus 2y agoHuawei had about 30% mobile phone market share in Europe before they got killed off - which is probably a part of the reason why it even happened. Can't have competition.
- sampa 2y agoand don't forget Nokia, that MS bought and killed
- mschuster91 2y ago> Huawei had about 30% mobile phone market share in Europe before they got killed off - which is probably a part of the reason why it even happened. Can't have competition. Europe doesn't really have much domestic production in phones that could have benefitted from eliminating Huawei. Nokia is all but dead, Siemens is long dead, Sony Ericsson is now just Sony and on life support... it's all Apple, Samsung and various Chinese nowadays.
- TeMPOraL 2y agoI think GP meant, US companies can't have competition on the European market.
- mschuster91 2y agoAgain: which US companies would that be? Apple doesn't benefit from banning Huawei, they're targeting completely different markets. Samsung is Korean. And Google (its Pixel line aside, which has an utterly negligible marketshare and effectively only exists to showcase bare-bones Android) doesn't care who is bringing in the Play Store bucks, for them it's no difference if it comes from Samsung, Huawei, Xiaomi, Oppo, Oneplus or whatever else.
- luyu_wu 2y agoCompletely do not understand this play. We make money from selling consumer chips to China, possibly put backdoors in their laptops, and now we want to remove that? Makes 0 sense from an economic AND national security standpoint considering these are laptop chips the US is banning. Huawei is already banned from selling, why would they kick the dead horse so to say. If anyone has any ideas, genuinely please let me know! I'm curious.
- whamlastxmas 2y agoRandom baseless speculation: intel and Qualcomm refused to add back doors as demanded by US government, probably because the companies believed they couldn’t stop China from finding out that they did. US gov said fine, no more sales. You can sell again when you add back doors.
- karma_pharmer 2y agoThis is actually highly credible and should not be downvoted. Ptychographic X-ray laminography has come a long way and can image even the latest chips at the transistor level: https://spectrum.ieee.org/xray-tech-lays-chip-secrets-bare https://spectrum.ieee.org/xray-tech-lays-chip-secrets-bare True, it requires a synchrotron (one of the few things that actually costs more than a chip fab), but China has those: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_Synchrotron_Radiation_Facility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_Synchrotron_Radiation... China might not be able to make bleeding-edge 2nm chips, but it has the equipment needed to expose any backdoors in them. Publicly, worldwide, with proof. That is an existential threat to any hardware manufacturer -- getting caught doing that is a bankruptcy-level event. Until recently they didn't have to be afraid of getting caught. Being able to image chips at the gate level or better is a critical lever in fixing the balance of power between hardware manufacturers and their customers. It's why Bunnie Huang's work on IRIS is so important: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39657936 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39657936
- whamlastxmas 2y agoMy speculation was a lot more simple: China can blackmail or bribe internal employees to disclose the back door. Significantly less expensive and easier
- pjmlp 2y agoYet another step to end globalisation, and make each country slowly look for alternatives. This is how Year of Desktop Linux will finally happen, eventually forks will be required to work around export restrictions of the two US OS vendors, running on top of ARM and RISC-V units produced by non-US companies.
- dragonelite 2y agoGlobalisation isn't ending its just changing from a point where Western companies expect to reap profits globally to now having to work hard and earn a bit of profit. I heard an interesting point that China will not escape the middle income trap, they will however just rug pull the developed nations straight back into middle income or even lower income.
- nebula8804 2y ago>I heard an interesting point that China will not escape the middle income trap, they will however just rug pull the developed nations straight back into middle income or even lower income. How would they do that?
- dragonelite 2y agoYou know we're hearing a lot about Chinese overcapacity lately from western Elites? They are afraid China will gobble up their value added industry and markets. Hence these sanctions and trying to stop China from developing their value added industries. So imaging being a non western company, are you really going to buy the more expensive western machinery or are you going to buy cheaper and probably better quality Chinese machinery? This probably means this will cut massively in western companies revenue and profits, making paying off or getting future loans harder etc. It will not happen tomorrow but i think this process will be done before 2050. I don't even think its an explicit Chinese leadership goal. Its just the result of China being the biggest and most competitive manufacturing market on the planet. So its mostly market forces doing their thing within China's consumer good and private sectors.
- throwaway4good 2y agoI know Huawei is bad but what’s the logic here? The US kills off Huawei’s access to Google Android and TSMC. Almost completely killing their consumer business. But then hands them a lifeline: you can buy chips at Qualcomm (but not Mediatek) and Intel (but not AMD). Allowing them to maintain a presence in consumer phones and laptops. Now 5 years later when they have finally built their own operating system and setup their own fabs - the US kills access to Intel and Qualcomm. Why?
- cjbgkagh 2y agoI agree, this is to Chinas benefit long term, it's only useful to the US if the US intends on doing a 'timing' attack. The simplest explanation is that those in charge of the US really are that stupid. The nefarious explanation would be that China is able to exert the influence needed to make this happen.
- throwaway4good 2y agoMaybe Huawei simply stopped lobbying now they have alternatives - it is known they spent millions in US lobbying just getting the daughter of their founder freed.
- tsimionescu 2y agoThis is an absurd spin. Huawei and teg Chinese leadership more broadly knew what they were getting themselves into by using Google tech on their flagship phones. They decided it was worth it, until the US cut them off. They could have started work on this new OS at any point before that, or at any point in the future while also selling Android smartphones. Having one less option is never a boon.
- rjzzleep 2y ago> The US kills off Huawei’s access to Google Android and TSMC. Almost completely killing their consumer business. One the other hand this is good for consumers. For a few years we used to make fun of HarmonyOS being a knockoff of Android, but we have now reached a point where they are due to cut Android compatibility out. They have a new polyglot UI stack that seems quite performant. Basically we now have a 3rd big smartphone mobile operating system that is about to hit global markets. However a few years ago Huawei started locking their bootloaders, so I have to wonder how much of the UI stack is actually going to be open source. I don't know too much about it but it seems to have some similarities to react native. Raycast changed my opinion on react native based apps on macos, and I think linux could benefit from such a thing, although I have only little hope that ArkUI will run on vanilla Linux.
- ChrisArchitect 2y agoAvoid syndicated content. Actual article: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-07/us-revokes-intel-qualcomm-licenses-to-sell-chips-to-huawei https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-07/us-revoke...
- kelnos 2y agoI think in this case the MSN source is better (or at least more accessible) since Bloomberg is behind a paywall.
- ein0p 2y agoThat’s just dumb though. Huawei will just make its own chips, and five years from now when this bullshit is over those chips will absolutely eviscerate the US companies. That’s sort of like a drug dealer withholding drugs from a chemist.
- threeseed 2y agoThere are export controls on ASML and Canon lithography machines. No chance of Huawei beating the likes of Nvidia, Intel, Apple in the next few decades at least.
- ein0p 2y agoThey are already at 7nm (low yield, but you gotta start somewhere), and they plan to invest $140B into this. I wouldn’t be so sure about them “not beating Intel” or other such prognostications. 140B _in China_ buys a lot more “trying” than it does in the West.
- threeseed 2y agoMeanwhile TSMC has 2nm at Apple scale and trialling Nvidia's new computational lithography. So it's not like the West is sitting around doing nothing.
- rjzzleep 2y agoIntel has bought all the high NA EUV ASML produces until the first quarter 2025 by the way. TSMC is not the west, TSMC is TSMC. Also China has started investing heavily in domestic AI chips. Huawei's Ascend is roughly comparable to the A100 I think, but you shouldn't forget that this has caused a flurry of GPU as a service company to pop up outside of China that serve GPU compute to Chinese customers. The best this kind of legislation does is make it a bit more expensive for China to access GPU compute. It's worth remembering that a lot of tech was banned from Iran, but that never stopped Iranians from getting any of those components. It just made them twice as expensive. https://www.trendforce.com/presscenter/news/20231211-11957.html https://www.trendforce.com/presscenter/news/20231211-11957.h...
- normalcreature 2y ago[dead]
- merricksb 2y agohttps://archive.md/CJZzN https://archive.md/CJZzN
- thriftwy 2y ago[flagged]
- snvzz 2y agoDumb near-sighted move. Short term, it's a minor annoyance for China. Yet the primary effect it will have is for China to become less dependent on foreign chips faster.
- hypertele-Xii 2y agoHow is China going to become independent of foreign chips without ASML's photolithography machines?
- DeathArrow 2y agoBy building their own machines and developing alternative techniques.
- rvba 2y agoChina couldnt produce ballpens utill around 2017. If companies can defend themselves against espionage and/or takeovers there can be a moat. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/01/18/finally-china-manufactures-a-ballpoint-pen-all-by-itself/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/01/18...
- maxglute 2y agoBallpoint pen TIPS. Which BTW USA _still_ DOESN'T produce - not can't (distinction important) just like PRC didn't want (again, not can't) to produce tips until 2017. Prior to 2017, only Switzerland, Japan made ballpoint tips. Reason PRC ended up making ballpoint tips was premiere used tips as proxy for scaling up precision manufacturing of tungsten carbide for advanced munitions. Which they did in about a year, because PRC focusing state capacity pretty good at demonlishing moats. In this case they got state metallurgical factory (TISCO) with revenue with $15 billion to divert (waste) their massive resources to make some ballpoint pen tips, which had a global addressable market of 20M, aka rounding error for PRC state owed metal industry. Meme/rumor is TISCO made one batch of ballpoint pen tip metal and that's enough to supply domestic tip maker for decades. The _real_ story behind the pen tips is building up machines to make advanced munitions at scale, few years later, i.e. now - we have stories of PRC cruise missile gigafactory that can churni out components for 1000 missiles per day. A few days is sum US+partner production per year. For reference JP acquiring 400 tomahawks for 1.7B.
- DeathArrow 2y agoI expect US hardware companies shares to start falling in about 10 years. I don't think it will take China more than that to reach parity on semiconductor manufacturing. After that we will see a flood of lower cost hardware coming to the rest of the world, CPUs, GPUs, AI chips. That will put pressure on Intel, Qualcomm, Nvidia and the likes. I'd invest in US tech companies for the next few years and after that move to Asian companies.
- speedylight 2y agoBut in 10 years the goalposts for what’s considered achieving parity will change, because China won’t be the only one making improvements in semiconductor manufacturing. The West will always have the upper hand so long as we don’t drop the ball completely.
- beAbU 2y agoAnd the dropping of balls by a US semiconductor manufacturer has never happened before. So we should be OK.
- DeathArrow 2y agoTo reach parity they just have to advance at a higher speed than the US. Totally doable with enough resources, planning and determination.
- maxglute 2y ago>West will always have the upper hand Every major western semi partner currently projecting talent shortage of 100,000s in 5-10+ year time frame. VS PRC at ~500k/700k of domestic IC talent they think they need for indigenous industry according to 2018 white paper (IIRC same year they started prioritizing talent production to first-level discipline), and now academic system is generating ~30k IC talent per year. TLDR is everyone maybe making improvements, but PRC uniquely positioned to have requisit talent to catchup/exceed, and have advantage of coordinating entire semi industrial base in single jurisdiction. Semi talent development is still one area where west is actively dropping ball, and unless TSMC Arizona sort out their worker/cultural drama, might continue to if west can't elevate semi to desirable career.
- PeterStuer 2y agoHonest curiosity: who benefits in a US-China tradewar? (I don't mean US or China, but actors within those regions)
- wumeow 2y ago> Qualcomm recently said that its business with Huawei is already limited and will soon shrink to nothing. It has been allowed to supply the Chinese company with chips that provide older 4G network connections. It’s prohibited from selling ones that allow 5G access. > Huawei doesn’t rank in Qualcomm’s list of top 10 customers, according to Bloomberg supply chain analysis. It also doesn’t feature in Intel’s list of top customers.