How America's Export Controls Failed to Keep Cutting-Edge AI Chips from China's Huawei (stripes.com)
- Reference: 0175379375
- News link: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/24/11/02/0540218/how-americas-export-controls-failed-to-keep-cutting-edge-ai-chips-from-chinas-huawei
- Source link: https://www.stripes.com/theaters/asia_pacific/2024-11-01/china-huawei-ai-chip-export-control-failure-15703671.html
> A few weeks ago, analysts at a specialized technological lab put a microchip from China under a powerful microscope. Something didn't look right... The microscopic proof was there that a chunk of the electronic components from Chinese high-tech champion Huawei Technologies had been produced by the world's most advanced chipmaker, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company.
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> That was a problem because two U.S. administrations in succession had taken actions to assure that didn't happen. The news of the breach of U.S. export controls, first reported in October by the tech news site [2]the Information , has sent a wave of concern through Washington... The chips were routed to Huawei through Sophgo Technologies, the AI venture of a Chinese cryptocurrency billionaire, according to two people familiar with the matter, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive topic... "It raises some fundamental questions about how well we can actually enforce these rules," said Emily Kilcrease, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security in Washington... Taiwan's Ministry of Economic Affairs confirmed that TSMC recently halted shipments to a "certain customer" and notified the United States after suspecting that customer might have directed its products to Huawei...
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> There's been much intrigue in recent days in the industry over how the crypto billionaire's TSMC-made chips reportedly ended up at Huawei. Critics accuse Sophgo of working to help Huawei evade the export controls, but it is also possible that they were sold through an intermediary, which would align with Sophgo's denial of having any business relationship with Huawei... While export controls are often hard to enforce, semiconductors are especially hard to manage due to the large and open nature of the global chip trade. Since the Biden administration implemented sweeping controls in 2022, there have been reports of widespread chip smuggling and semiconductor black markets allowing Chinese companies to access necessary chips...
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> Paul Triolo, technology policy lead at Albright Stonebridge Group, said companies were trying to figure out what lengths they had to go to for due diligence: "The guidelines are murky."
[1] https://www.stripes.com/theaters/asia_pacific/2024-11-01/china-huawei-ai-chip-export-control-failure-15703671.html
[2] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/u-s-probes-tsmcs-dealings-with-huawei
No surprise (Score:2)
No surprise here. Export Controls in many large companies is a joke. Yes, the companies do try and follow the laws, but funding for this area is quite low and lots of items do slip through. If the company get caught, pay the fine, make slight adjustments and move on.
Plus how would you stop say a company ing a "good" country buying the items and in turn sell them to a "bad" company, while adding a nice large markup ? Tough process all around.
Duh! (Score:2)
> "It raises some fundamental questions about how well we can actually enforce these rules," said Emily Kilcrease, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security in Washington.
Believing that regulations from an entire ocean away had a chance of preventing high-value tech from crossing the Taiwan Strait is, to put it kindly, hubris. Perhaps more realistically, I would call it magical thinking. For all the alarm bells they ring about the dangers posed by China, the US seems to pretty consistently underestimate Chinese capabilities and persistence.
America really needs to turn itself back into the world's premier source of technology, both in innovation and in manufacturing. But I su
When cargo value much greater than shipping cost (Score:2)
When the cargo value is much greater than shipping cost, then it is almost impossible to stamp out trans-shipping operations. You can put over 100,000 GPU chips in a shipping container, so the added cost to ship a container twice rather than once is an insignificant extra 2 cents per chip. First ship the container somewhere that isn't going to try too hard to enforce some other country's mandate where it will then put on a ship going somewhere it shouldn't be (which can be further obfuscated by multiple p
This is not surprising (Score:2)
Bans don't work
See the drug war for another example
Re: (Score:2)
> Bans don't work See the drug war for another example
Bans/sanctions don't have to completely end the stream of high-tech chips to China. They only have to work well enough to make the supply of these chips so unreliable that a company like Huawei becomes seriously nervous about staking the future of their premium product lines on sporadic chip deliveries from a bunch of smugglers. Sanctions can do that if you follow them up with vigor and sanction any company that sells chips to a China based entity. You don't even have to sanction all of them, just find some
A lesson from long, long ago (Score:3, Insightful)
"The more you tighten your grip, America, the more manufacturers will slip through your fingers."
- Princess Laia -
Or something like that. I heard the quote long, long ago and far, far away, and my memory ain't what it used to be.
Re: (Score:2)
I cannot fathom the beltway morons that thought they could pull this off. They cannot even solve any of the US problems on their own ground, and they think they can pull this off on the other side of the world...
I'll just leave this here as one angle to why this whole ordeal might have happened: [1]https://www.ianwelsh.net/the-l... [ianwelsh.net]
[1] https://www.ianwelsh.net/the-loss-of-american-leadership-competence-viewed-from-wwii/