Huawei chairman thanks the US for export restrictions on chips, says it supercharged China’s semiconductor industry — Washington’s export controls encouraged Chinese firms to invest in R&D and build their own tech stack competing with American tech
Was Jensen right all along?
Huawei’s current Rotating Chairman and Deputy Chairman Xu Zhijun said during an interview that the company is thankful for the pressure that the U.S. has applied on it and China, in general. The comment came after someone asked how Huawei came up with the groundbreaking LogicFolding chip architecture the company developed, and Xu said that he was grateful toward the U.S. for allowing the company to achieve that, reports Huawei Central.
“If the United States hadn’t forced our country, our companies, and our industry, we wouldn’t have done something like this. But we are also grateful to the US for enabling our country’s semiconductor industry chain to truly grow,” the Huawei Rotating Chairman said. “Now the momentum is very good, and everyone recognizes and supports it.”
Huawei was one of the first major Chinese tech companies to get a blanket ban from the U.S., after it, along with several other Chinese tech companies, was excluded from the North American market in 2019 by the first Trump administration. In 2022, President Joe Biden enacted export controls on AI GPUs, essentially banning China-based firms from acquiring powerful hardware like the Nvidia A100 and H100, as well as AMD Instinct MI250 and MI250X chips.
Both companies eventually created less potent versions of their top hardware to comply with White House regulations. But even then, President Donald Trump enacted a complete export ban during his second term, forcing Nvidia to write-off $5.5 billion in GPUs and costing AMD $800 million in sales. Trump eventually made a 180-degree turn, allowing Chinese companies to acquire H200 chips as long as they can get an export license from the U.S. and that AMD and Nvidia pay a 25% fee to the federal government, but the semiconductor landscape has already changed by then.
While some firms resorted to smuggling and the black market to get their needed chips, the export controls forced the majority of them to look toward domestic alternatives instead. Even though these chips aren’t as powerful or efficient as what Nvidia or AMD offer, it's still better than having no chips at all. This means that local Chinese chip companies are getting more revenue, allowing them to reinvest their earnings into their R&D efforts. Because of this, they have started releasing chips that could somehow compete against what U.S. chipmakers can offer in terms of performance (although they still consume a lot more power).
This development is compounded by Beijing’s push for gaining semiconductor independence. So, even though many Chinese tech companies still want to buy Nvidia chips, likely because of its CUDA platform, the central government ordered these firms to purchase homegrown chips instead. It even went as far as instructing customs officers to block H200 AI chips at the border, and even recently extended the ban to the RTX 5090D V2 gaming GPU.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has always been against AI chip export bans, arguing that keeping American technology readily available across the world is key to extending its influence. Furthermore, he said that cutting Chinese firms from U.S. hardware would only force domestic chipmakers to innovate and build solutions that would compete against what Nvidia has. True enough, Nvidia’s AI chip market share in China has fallen to “zero percent,” compared to the 95% it previously held before the AI chip bans. And even if that’s the case, Chinese firms still continue making frontier AI models and remain competitive against American AI tech companies.
The chip ban did have a negative effect on Chinese AI development, in that it delayed its progress for a few years. But in that short span, many homegrown firms stepped up and took on the challenge of developing alternatives to American tech. Today, we’re starting to see the fruits of their labor and investment, which wouldn’t have accelerated if Chinese tech companies could readily buy American chips.
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Jowi Morales is a tech enthusiast with years of experience working in the industry. He’s been writing with several tech publications since 2021, where he’s been interested in tech hardware and consumer electronics.
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erazog The sanctions have made China try to polish some of its chip production capabilities but it remains to be seen who will use them other than the Chinese market forced to buy Chinese made.Reply
Actual experts on semi-conductor manufacturing like Dr Ian Cutress explain that most of what Huawei announced was nothing new just a rebranding of technologies that already are in use, only one of the things they talked about was market leading if they pull it off.
China is still 10-15 years behind TSMC and Intel for chip production who are not standing still, even if you catch up to were TSMC is now where will TSMC be in another 10 years. -
Zaranthos You're welcome, but you were already developing your own production. A lot of what you have is just stolen tech, or spun off from deals with other companies like AMD. The games you play are obvious as you ban or say you don't want Nvidia chips and then smuggle them in illegally because you know full well you need them to truly be competitive. Good luck catching up, but even at that you play dirty as you fund and fuel anti data center sentiment in the US because the best way to slow us down is to generate outrage internally.Reply
I'm all for more production, more diversity, and more competition. I think any country that's reasonably large enough should have some level of semiconductor production locally because this stuff is now used in almost everything anyway. The more people working on this stuff the better because there will always be someone who looks at something differently and goes, hmm, I think we can change this and make it better.
Bluster and bloviate all you want but you're still sneaking in the best tech you can get your hands on even when you act like you're not. Nobody wants to be left behind in the AI race. -
acadia11 Reply
You must not know much about the world if you don’t understand Chinese influence , take a step outside of a western centric view and you’d be well aware china is a massive global player both politicially and technologically. hauwei is a massive company with some serious reach and at the forefront of a slew of technology across multiple verticles. Go into Latin America, an Africa, and beyond and china has a serious “imperialistic” footprint. There is a reason why it’s stated there are two superpowers today china and US, and as far as AI goes, china is ahead if everyone in the world except the US and it’s not a question of if this gap will close , it’s just when. Their semiconductor industry will be able to compete with EUV producing homegrown machines in the next few years. Granted it is not as clean as ASMLs solution but it’s only a matter of time: And they’ve already extended out of necessity DUV in ways the west didn’t bother.Admin said:Huawei's current Rotating Chairman thanked the United States for its export bans, which boosted the progress of China's semiconductor industry. He made the comment after unveiling the groundbreaking LogicFolding chip architecture, when reporters asked him how the company came up with the idea.
Huawei chairman thanks the US for export restrictions on chips, says it supercharged China’s semiconductor industry — Washington’s export controls... : Read more -
JRStern I agree at least that restricting GPU sales to China was silly, but we have a huge bureaucracy in DC who worry about such things and they have to justify their paychecks.Reply
It will just force China to duplicate ASML technology, and such. Well good for them. So should the US.
China is big enough and smart enough to do it, too, but they're also cheap enough they'd never do it unless we both squeezed them and irritated them into doing it.
SMH -
bit_user Some of this is bluster, but it's pretty obvious that the embargoes weren't going to be a long-term solution. I had hoped there was a plan to use them as leverage, but now I'm really not sure there was much thought behind them.Reply -
bit_user Reply
This is not accurate. It will take them about a decade to catch up with TSMC, because TSMC is not standing still.acadia11 said:Their semiconductor industry will be able to compete with EUV producing homegrown machines in the next few years.
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/taiwan-national-science-council-believes-china-is-10-years-behind-tsmc
Intel used DUV for their 10 nm node, while TSMC was moving into EUV. That was a big part of the problems they had with it.acadia11 said:they’ve already extended out of necessity DUV in ways the west didn’t bother. -
bit_user Reply
As a first move, it wasn't silly. It was only silly if you had no plan for what comes next.JRStern said:I agree at least that restricting GPU sales to China was silly,
China was going to do that anyway, just like they have with every other industry they've dominated. This just throw a massive roadblock in the progress their fabs were making, basically forcing them to stand still until they could build lithography equipment domestically.JRStern said:It will just force China to duplicate ASML technology, and such. Well good for them. So should the US.
No, this fundamentally misunderstands China.JRStern said:they're also cheap enough they'd never do it unless we both squeezed them and irritated them into doing it. -
hotaru251 Reply
Was Jensen right all along?
yes.
but that wasnt an issue for the world just those who profit on the technology involved.
China having to be creative and invest like most bans just means they are forced to innovate and invest which is much better long term.
This is actually a boon for the global economy as a whole in the long term as it means more options which competition is always better & when the "ai" plague pops and international ties are less hostile then the consumer benefit from it. -
acadia11 Reply
DUV still is utilized , not everything needs EUV , my point was that they have squeezed much more out of the capabilities of DUV relative to what others in market are doing out of necessity.bit_user said:This is not accurate. It will take them about a decade to catch up with TSMC, because TSMC is not standing still.
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/taiwan-national-science-council-believes-china-is-10-years-behind-tsmc
Intel used DUV for their 10 nm node, while TSMC was moving into EUV. That was a big part of the problems they had with it.
On EUV , it’s not about TSMC , it’s about the tooling and ASML. China has already started sampling alternative approaches , feel free to read up, we can argue 4 or 10 the point it will happen. They have the technical know how, the capital , and more importantly and unified national directive to ensure this tech stack independence. In the 70s it was decided and 40 odd years later they are depending on domain number 1 or 2 in technology. Consider that they literally decided ok this whole farm experimentation Mao Revolution is wrong and they changed the entire culture to become a super power in essentially 1 generation. As stated it’s not an if but when.