back to article China gorging on silicon before Uncle Sam slams the door

China's semiconductor imports were up more than 14 percent in 2024 as companies in the country stockpiled ahead of widely expected fresh restrictions from Washington and pressure grows to develop local alternatives instead. Between January and November this year, China imported a total of 501.47 billion chips, a 14.8 percent …

  1. Bebu sa Ware
    Facepalm

    You can be certain...

    that Trump's oligarch cronies already have highly lucretive, embargo busting channels in place just waiting for their orange accomplice to put the restrictions in place.

  2. MachDiamond Silver badge

    Silicon battles

    At one point, China was a major supplier of pure Silicon ingots used to make solar cells. Then they were making the cells and limiting the sales of Silicon ingots. After that they started selling complete panels and limited the sale of cells. One of the data points they used to set those cutoffs was how much them impacted each market so there was less of a chance of competition just ramping up production again. If they could put some companies/divisions out of business, buy their equipment at auction to take it out of the market, that was inline with what they planned and solidified the monopoly.

    With the US push to pay companies to build fabs, will there be raw material availability if China counter-bans those materials from export to the US? Given how one-dimensional politicians think, they might have overlooked this.

  3. Snowy Silver badge
    Megaphone

    What every happened...

    To the idea that China was building their own chips...

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