TSMC blows whistle on potential sanctions-busting shenanigans from Huawei TSMC has reportedly tipped off US officials to a potential attempt by Huawei to circumvent export controls and obtain AI chips manufactured by the Taiwanese company. The world's largest semiconductor contract manufacturer sounded the alarm after a customer made orders for a chip resembling Huawei's Ascend 910B, a processor …
"Sanctions don't work and are counter-productive."
But they send a signal, and they're better than dropping bombs, perhaps?
Also, if you're engaged in a global economic war (as China and the US are) then it makes no sense to help your adversary by openly trading things that are of particularly high value to either party. Continuing to buy cheap Chinese consumer tat up to the level of say furniture and domestic appliances isn't really the stuff of sanctions, but protecting your domestic EV industry from being wiped out before it's established, surely that makes sense? Likewise limiting the flow of tools and parts of any kind that might support the other side's defence, comms, or high tech industrial base make sense.
As you suggest, sanctions struggle to work as intended and can be worked around, but still, does it make sense to freely sell the Chinese Copying Party with all the latest tech developed by US corporations, or those countries who place a higher value on being friendly with the US than they do with China?
.. bombs, consumer tat, copying !?
"Chinese have been making huge leaps forward. They built their own spacestation, landed on the dark side of the moon, in one fell swoop on mars, and started fabbing 7nm chips. If I was the US I'd be fucking terrified of what happens in the next 5 - 10 years"
Peshman
Addiction on sanctions, bombing, media lies, etc. are not going well at the end, as any addiction ends.
On a more mundane level I'm pleased that the Japanese at least are taking China seriously. Not by muttering dumb stuff about bombs, cheap tat and copying but by buying their cars and having a facility to reverse engineer them to figure out how how they can make decent quality vehicles so cheaply.
(...and no, its not slave labor, government subsidies or anything like that. Its a combination of design and vertical integration of manufacturing -- put in layman's language I'd suggest that vertical integration yields fewer places for profit to be extracted during the manufacturing process leading to overall lower costs and clever design -- something that Tesla has figured out -- leads to far fewer components in the product so cheaper, more reliable etc.)
Read this and weep (or panic...):-
https://www.nzz.ch/english/copycat-no-longer-china-is-major-force-in-the-electric-car-sector-ld.1768528
Look at what the Japanese did in the 1970s, then the Koreans in the 1980s, the Taiwanese in the 1990s, etc.
Copy to learn, improve manufacturing, improve quality, improve performance. Then outsource to the next in line because of cheaper labour costs - rinse and repeat.
In the 2000s the Chinese followed the pattern and now some western economies are complaining about it?!?! I think the only way to slow the pattern is to NOT outsource to the cheapest labour - won't stop the eventual industrial knowledge leakage it should slow it down.
And what will happen with the BRICS mob?
Sanctions are not binary tools; they are there to slow down activities. They are also a political tool. The US sanctioning China means that China is a pariah nation. Being snactioned also slows down trade. The long term impact is that countries would rather deal with a non-sanctioned country than one which is.
It seems that TSMC has made statement and denied the initial claims made by The Information.
So who knows what the true situation is. I suppose somewhere between true and false might be the best place to look.
Personally I find it difficult to believe the story 'as is' but there is a mature 'grey' market through which to get certain products. I just don't see a chip design getting through the screening process.
On the other hand Tech Insights is in the business of looking deep into finished products so I find it difficult brush them off as unreliable.
We'll have to wait a little longer but if the Commerce Department thinks it's Fish On! they will definitely make a song and dance of it.
Looking forward to seeing a TSMC executive put on house arrest and waiting extradition! LOL /s
"TechInsights dismantled the Ascend 910B AI chip. During exploration, the research team found an advanced TSMC SoC within a multi-chip system of the processor. .. the finding hints at the !stocked components.
Sources mentioned that Huawei launched its Ascend 910B in August 2019, before the sanctions. At that time, the chip used to be produced under the TSMC foundry."
HC, Reuters, Yahoo
Same fuzz as Mate 60 Pro phone has used !stocked SK Hynix's LPDDR5 and NAND flash memory chips.
https://www.huaweicentral.com/tsmc-notified-us-about-its-chip-used-in-huawei-devices-report/
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