Beijing wants Chinese outfits to seek alternatives to US silicon Four of China's top industry bodies have published advice suggesting members source fewer semiconductors from US silicon slingers, because supply chain issues caused by sanctions mean they are "no longer secure and reliable." "To ensure the safe, stable and sustainable development of my country's internet industry, I call on …
China gave us a warning on the rare earths a decade ago and US mines already re-opened as a result. Plus Australia has some as well.
There was a recent discovery in Oklahoma that they're claiming has over 2 billion tons of rare earths, which is over 100x larger than the largest known. Even if they are wildly overestimating it, no doubt the US government will cut a lot of red tape to allow them to begin mining there quickly if China follows through (i.e. it isn't some sort of bargaining chip to get Trump to back down on his 100% tariff threats)
When have you ever seen that clown back down from whatever bullshit statement he's ever made ?
He'll "correct" a map with a Sharpie if he has to, but he will never back down.
If he really has to, he'll let an underling do that, then claim he was never aware of it and he's still right.
He won't have to back down, he's been all over the place with his tariff threats. One day he's talking 100% to China, the next day he says 60%. One time he said 300%. He's talked about 25% tariffs for Canada and Mexico, and also 10%, 20% and 30% tariffs for the entire world.
He can do whatever he wants with tariffs, and claim that was his plan all along. That's what he always does, he takes every possible position on something (look at his flip flopping multiple times on abortion during the campaign) and then his defenders will push back on "300% tariffs on China will destroy the economy" with fanciful claims about how it would lead to a renaissance in American manufacturing.
His supporters will choose to believe what they want to believe - fully 1/3 of the voters who voted for him said in exit polls they wanted Roe v Wade reinstated. That's why he flooded the zone with conflicting statements about abortion all the time, the people who don't want the abortion bans we have now let alone a nationwide abortion ban chose to believe him when he said he "wouldn't support" a nationwide abortion ban. But he also pushed back when Vance said he'd veto such a nationwide ban, which his anti-abortion supporters chose to believe as meaning that he'd sign such a bill. He went back and forth on his support for Florida's ballot measure on abortion. Everyone chose to hear what they wanted to hear. I will have zero sympathy for the folks who voted for him and don't get up getting what they wanted to believe they'd be getting.
As far as I know rare-earth materials aren't rare at all, they're quite abundant in Earth's crust. The problem isn't mining rare-earth materials but treating them to form usable half-finished products. Of which China produces 90%, even Australia is sending their minerals to China to process them. Taken in reverse, what do you do with thousands of tons of rocks that contain 0.5% of usable stuff ? We in Europe would be completely at loss to do it today, even if we mined the rocks.
As far as I know rare-earth materials aren't rare at all, they're quite abundant in Earth's crust. The problem isn't mining rare-earth materials but treating them to form usable half-finished products.
My understanding was that China did all this because they got set up to do it, and for the volumes required it was cheaper to just buy from them. But outside of the physical lead time taken to construct refineries, there's no real impediment to doing it in the West. We have the chemistry and the tech (some of the early procedures for purifying REEs were developed during the Manhattan Project).
Taken in reverse, what do you do with thousands of tons of rocks that contain 0.5% of usable stuff ? We in Europe would be completely at loss to do it today, even if we mined the rocks.
This is basically true for most mining applications - whether copper, gold or "other". Plenty of minerals are better than 0.5% but plenty aren't. The usual answer is to just pile it up. REEs are mostly found in hard rock. With a bit of thought, the spoil may well be useful in construction applications (such as concrete), depending on the specific mineralogy of the ore - just as we've been using fly ash in concrete for years. If this can displace virgin mining of aggregates than that's no bad thing.
Rare earths processing is very environmentally dirty. The US was happy to let China pollute their own land and allow our mines to shut down. The days of being able to "export pollution" are numbered.
The nice thing about a huge source like the one reported in Oklahoma is that it may mean the rare earths are at a slightly greater density than normal. That's the reason they are called "rare", it is because they don't clump together in the way gold, copper, iron tend to so you have to process a LOT of material to get the rare earths. Your next problem is that they all go together - you can't mine for just neodymium, it is found in the same deposits as all the other rare earths. Separating them from each other is difficult, and uses some toxic materials and creates toxic byproducts. I think there has been some improvement on that front in the last couple decades though, so it won't be as bad as the state of the art was when we decided we were happy to let China do that instead.
"just as we've been using fly ash in concrete for years"
Whilst this is one way of "solving" the problem, it turns out that if LFTRs become a "thing", the concentration of thorium in coal ash slurry lakes is sufficient to justify mining them for fuel - essentially a self-funding way of cleaning up doezens of Superfund sites.
The _2_ largest USA environmental disasters so far this century have been ash slurry dam breaks
LFTRs also solve the rare earths problem by creating a market for the single most common rare earth that drops out of the processing system, fixing the economics of extracting all the others
"The problem isn't mining rare-earth materials but treating them to form usable half-finished products"
It isn't even that: The real problem is thorium
That element makes up more of most rare earth deposits than every other rare earth combined and being slightly radioactive can't be put back in the hole it came from. Isolating it from mining tailings and then sequestering it is what's destroyed the economics of rare earth mines worldwide
China solved the issue about 20 years ago by buying up domestic thorium production and stockpiling it in anticipation of their LFTR projects paying off - it essentially turned Chinese rare earth mines into thorium mines with a rare earth side gig
Also anticipating LFTRs paying off: A 3500MWt LFTR capable of producing enough high quality (ie: seriously hot) thermal energy to replace coal burners and generate dry/supercritical steam is predicted to be around 1/4 the size of coal burners _including the containment building_. Chinese coal power stations tend to have a noticeable patch of unbuilt ground adjacent to the turbine halls which says to me that someone's been planning for the long term in ways that Western economies and politicians simply don't
"If Chinese organizations follow this advice they'll end up with inferior PCs and servers. Lenovo recently created a laptop that uses a made-in-China CPU from local x86 licensee Zhaoxin that struggles to match the performance of five year old AMD and Intel chips. Another Chinese chipmaker, Loongson, is also believed to be about four years behind state-of-the-art desktop CPUs. Loongson's server CPUs are also modest."
The Longsoon CPU is apparently comparable to a 2020 era Core i3, so for 99% of home or work use they sound like they have more than adequate performance. Doubly so if not running Windows 10.
My current work-supplied PC is a 2014 era HP Prodesk tower (4th gen Core i7, 32GB ram and SSD) - I am slowly preparing for this going EOL with the Windows 11 upgrades and moving to a work-supplied Intel NUC8 (8th gen core i3). The NUC's performance may not be quite the same on paper as the older i7 but it feels just as responsive running W10 alongside all the usual Office stuff and the company's proprietary analysis software. Boot Ubuntu on either of these machines and they fly - these Chinese CPU's don't sound like they'd be that bad from a performance perspective. Might not be so keen on them reporting everything back to Uncle Xi and friends, though....
"Might not be so keen on them reporting everything back to Uncle Xi and friends, though...."
Why?
There are no extradition treaties between Europe and the US to China so I'm curious to understand the issue.
Surely it's much more of a concern that western nations slurp personal data as if it's going out of fashion?
The Longsoon CPU is apparently comparable to a 2020 era Core i3, so for 99% of home or work use they sound like they have more than adequate performance. Doubly so if not running Windows 10.
My current work-supplied PC is a 2014 era HP Prodesk tower...
Quite. Work updated me this year to an M3 Macbook Air from a 2014-era Retina iMac, which was still chugging along, although it needed more RAM and bottlenecked on storage as it had one of the short-lived "Fusion Drives" (SSDs were still violently expensive).
The M3 is spankingly fast, but in everyday usage the most noticeable difference is the massive drop in power consumption.1 This is rather nice when one is WFH and paying for electricity.
But really, for normal desktop usage, anything from the last 5-10 years is "good enough". If you're a hyperscaler crunching big data or training "AI" models, then you'll suffer on older hardware (time and/or power efficiency/electricity cost), but for everyone else... eh? It's good enough.
1. A quick google suggests the iMac had something like an i5-4690, with a TDP in the 85W area, whereas the M3 (4x the CPUMark, and double the single-thread perf) makes do with just 20W flat-out (and much less most of the time on the Efficiency cores. Idle states are probably lower power than the i5s were as well). The new (Dell Ultrasharp) monitor is probably rather more power efficient than the old retina as well - display tech having moved along somewhat in the last decade.
I don't think Ga, Ge and Sb are usually classed as rare earth elements. Even though the article didn't state they were, one might have drawn that implication.
Geosciences Australia defines rare earth elements:
"The group of metals referred to as rare earth elements (REE) comprises the 15 elements of the lanthanide series. Metals in the lanthanide series are: lanthanum (La), cerium (Ce), praseodymium (Pr), neodymium (Nd), promethium (Pm), samarium (Sm), europium (Eu), gadolinium (Gd), terbium (Tb), dysprosium (Dy), holmium (Ho), erbium (Er), thulium (Tm), ytterbium (Yb) and lutetium (Lu). In addition, yttrium (Y) and scandium (Sc) are often grouped with the lanthanides and referred to as REE."
There are many ways to get germanium and gallium besides the normal method of native sulfide deposits and as a byproduct of zinc mining. The large stores of flyash which the US has from old coal powerplants are probably useful as a source, once the price gets to appropriate levels. Antimony is found in lead. There are a bunch of sources for that in Oklahama, where there are huge supplies of old lead tailings from ammunition production during WW II.
Imagine if China, prohibited from importing the high-bandwidth memory required for AI just... didn't bother building it's own LLMs. What a tragedy for their economy as they build useful software and don't burn all their time and resources on weird bullshit generators that don't work. It could put them way behind the US on the all-important bullshit-generation front.
I've never understood how technology bans of high performance processors to China work.
Surely, many of these processors are being exported to China so that they can be built into the servers and PCs that are being shipped to the rest of the world?
Once on Chinese soil, can't they just be hijacked, or even the finished products be diverted into China? I know that they would be missed, but what is stopping this happening? If the shipping of processes to China intended for rest-of-world products was stopped, wouldn't that mean cutting of your nose to spite your face?
I know that Taiwan, South Korea and Vietnam are also building these systems, but aren't a large number still manufactured in mainland China?
I must be missing something. Please educate me!
Alibaba's Yitian 710 server-grade Arm CPU was rated in April as the fastest such processor offered
Yeah, but that's not being fabbed in China, so it isn't really a domestic part, now is it? That still leaves China vulnerable to sanctions. That specific
chip/design/company just hasn't run afoul of sanctions so foreign fabs (TSMC or Samsung) are free to run them off and ship them to China, for now. Not that I see that changing, as long as they don't figure out how to significantly boost the speeds and match up to the latest Intel/AMD chips.
RiscV in China is scaling up as a direct response to the sanctions being loaded onto ARM designs
None of these sanctions will "stop" China in any case. Best case scenario is that it slows them down a little - but it should be noted that easy access to foreign technology reduces the incentive to push indigenous development hard and allows that sector to be playing "catchup" forever
Once indigenous designs are the ONLY game allowed in town, serious money gets poured into making them better and China ends up pushing its way well ahead of the competition
End result is that the USA hegemony gets broken, but it'll be messy in the meantime
The CCP wants to be self sufficient. Having less than cutting edge CPU's is far less important than missing critical components of their supply line after the Taiwan crisis.
This is where the US and EU are likely to get tripped up because transitioning self-sufficiency is very hard for advanced Western countries. By that logic, the CCP just gave the US a helpful foot up on learning to be self sufficient. I half expect the CCP to realize their mistake and withdraw the embargo, just like they did last time. Although, with import tariffs, it might make more sense to keep the embargo and sell indirectly to the US through third parties.
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