The new Cold War » China's Big Fund | The CHIPS Act | America's fab renaissance | Roots of the conflict | The impact in 2023 | The impact in 2022
Semiconductors power everything from PCs and data centers to cars, lightbulbs, and refrigerators. Control over their manufacture means control over billions of dollars and the world economy -- and the US, China, Taiwan, and others are waging a geopolitical battle for exactly that. Welcome to the chip war.
Major moments
Dec. 2, 2024: The DOC ratcheted up sanctions to curtail China's AI and military tech, this time entirely blocking shipments of HBM memory to China.
May 8, 2024: The U.S. government has withdrawn select export licenses from Intel and Qualcomm, effectively preventing them from supplying processors to Huawei.
Mar. 9, 2024: China is assembling the third phase of its Big Fund investment in semiconductor projects, a $27 billion investment to counter U.S. sanctions.
Jan. 27, 2024: The DOC introduced a proposal to prevent foreign entities, particularly from China, from using U.S. cloud computing for AI model training, a new level to the conflict.
Nov. 02, 2023: The Nvidia RTX 4090 -- The fastest gaming GPU -- will no longer be available for export to China starting Nov. 17.
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Oct. 24, 2023: The DOC sped up the implementation of its latest export curbs, immediately blocking Nvidia from shipping A100, A800, H100, H800, and L40S GPUs to China.
Oct. 7, 2023: Senators Marco Rubio and Mark Warner demand a limit to China's access to American RISC-V innovations.
Aug. 10, 2023: President Joe Biden signed an executive order restricting U.S. investments in Chinese tech sectors, including AI, semiconductors, and quantum computing.
Aug. 01, 2022: The U.S. extended its ban on chipmaking equipment produced by domestic firms that are sold to Chinese companies.
Dec. 18, 2020: The DOC blacklisted SMIC along with 60 other Chinese companies citing ties with the Chinese People's Liberation Army.
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