In case you haven’t noticed, let me alert you to exciting developments: the United States is now in conflict with Russia and China at the same time.
Grandma always said, “Never fight Russia and China at the same time.” Just like Henry Kissinger. Doing so may be necessary to secure our national interests. But make no mistake: we are in uncharted waters. I just hope these aren’t our new “forever wars”.
The struggle with Russia is indirect but obvious, escalating and violent. The country has been arming the Ukrainians with missiles and intelligence to force the Russians to withdraw. While it in no way detracts from the bravery of the Ukrainians, US and NATO support played an important role in Ukraine’s battlefield successes. Just ask the Russians. But how will this war end? Nobody knows.
Today, though, I want to focus on the fight with China, which is less visible and doesn’t involve gunfire, because it’s being fought mostly with transistors that switch between digital 1s and 0s. But it will have as big an impact, if not bigger, on the global balance of power as the outcome of the Russian-Ukraine fight. And it has little to do with Taiwan.
It’s a fight over semiconductors – the fundamental technology of the information age. The alliance that designs and manufactures the world’s smartest chips will also have the smartest precision weapons, the smartest factories, and the smartest quantum computing tools to break virtually any form of encryption. Today, the US and its partners lead, but China is determined to catch up — and now we are determined to avoid it. The game started.
Recently, the Biden administration issued a new set of export regulations that actually say to China, “We believe you are three generations of technology behind us in logic and memory chips and equipment and we will make sure you never catch up with us.” . Or, as national security adviser Jake Sullivan put it more diplomatically: “Given the fundamental nature of certain technologies, such as advanced logic and memory chips, we must maintain as much leadership as possible” — forever.
“The US has essentially declared war on China’s ability to promote the use of high-end computing for economic and security gains,” Paul Triolo, China and technology expert at consultancy Albright Stonebridge, told the Financial Times. Or, as China’s embassy in Washington put it, the US is pursuing “sci-tech hegemony” [ciência-tecnologia].
But where does this war end? Nobody knows. I don’t want to be fooled by a China that is increasingly using technology for absolute control at home and frightening power projection abroad. But if we are now stuck on the path of denying China’s advanced technologies forever — eliminating any hope of win-win collaborations with Beijing on issues like climate and cybercrime, where we face mutual threats and are the only two powers that can make a difference — , what kind of world will that produce? China should be asking the same questions.
All I know for sure is that regulations issued by President Joe Biden’s Commerce Department are a massive new barrier in export controls that will prevent China from buying the most advanced semiconductors from the West or equipment to manufacture them on its own.
The new regulations also bar any US engineer or scientist from helping China manufacture chips without specific approval, even if that American is working on equipment in China that is not subject to export controls. The regulations also tighten tracking to ensure that US-designed chips sold to civilian companies in China do not find their way into the hands of the Chinese military.
And, perhaps most controversially, Biden’s team added a “foreign direct product rule” which, as the Financial Times noted, “was first used by the Donald Trump administration against the Chinese technology group Huawei” and “of fact prohibits any US or non-US company from providing certain Chinese entities with hardware or software whose supply chain contains US technology.”
This last rule is huge, because the most advanced semiconductors are made by what I call a “complex adaptive coalition” of companies in the United States, Europe and Asia.
Think of it this way: AMD, Qualcomm, Intel, Apple, and Nvidia excel at designing chips that have billions of transistors packed more and more tightly to produce the processing power needed. Synopsys and Cadence create sophisticated computer-aided design tools and software on which chipmakers actually craft their newest ideas. Applied Materials creates and modifies the materials to forge the billions of transistors and connecting wires on the chip. The Dutch ASML supplies the lithography tools in partnership with, among others, the German Zeiss SMT, which specializes in optical lenses, which designs the stencils on the silicon wafers from these designs, using deep and extreme ultraviolet light – a short wavelength. that can print tiny designs onto a microchip. Intel, Lam Research, KLA and companies from Korea to Japan and Taiwan also play important roles in this coalition.
The point is, the more we push the boundaries of physics and materials science to put more transistors on a chip to get more processing power and keep advancing artificial intelligence, the less likely it is that any one company or country can excel in all of them. parts of the design and manufacturing process. We need the whole coalition. The reason Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., known as TSMC, is considered the world’s leading chip maker is that all members of this coalition trust TSMC with their most intimate trade secrets, which it then combines and applies for the benefit of the whole. .
As the coalition partners do not trust that China will not steal their intellectual property, Beijing is trying to replicate on its own, with old technologies, the chips made by the world’s stars. China managed to steal a certain amount of chip technology, including 28 nanometer technology from TSMC, in 2017.
Until recently, the leading Chinese chipmaker, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Co., was thought to be mostly stuck at this chip level, although it claims to have produced some in the 14nm and even 7nm scale, through lithography manipulation. oldest Deep UV light from ASML. US experts told me, however, that China cannot accurately mass-produce these chips without the latest ASML technology — which is now banned in the country.
I interviewed US Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo, who oversees new chip export controls, and the $52.7 billion Biden has just designated to support more US research into next-generation semiconductors and bring advanced manufacturing of chips back. Raimondo rejects the idea that the new regulations are tantamount to an act of war.
“The US was in an untenable position,” he told me. “Today we are purchasing 100% of our advanced logic chips overseas – 90% from TSMC in Taiwan and 10% from Samsung in Korea.” (That’s pretty crazy, but it’s true.)
“We don’t manufacture any of the chips in the US that we need for artificial intelligence, for our military, for our satellites, for our space programs” — not to mention the myriad non-military applications that power our economy. The recent Chips Act, she said, was the “offensive initiative” to strengthen the entire innovation ecosystem so that more advanced chips are made in the US.
Imposing new export controls on advanced chip-making technologies on China, she said, “was our defensive strategy. China has a military-civilian merger strategy,” and Beijing has made it clear “that it intends to become fully self-sufficient in technologies.” advanced” to dominate both civilian commercial markets and the battlefield of the 21st century. “We cannot ignore China’s intentions.”
So, to protect the US and allies, and all the technologies invented individually and collectively, “what we did was the next logical step, prevent China from getting to the next step,” she added. The US and its allies design and manufacture “the most advanced supercomputing chips, and we don’t want them in China’s hands and used for military purposes.”
The main focus, concluded Raimondo, “is to play offense – to innovate faster than the Chinese. But at the same time, we’ll tackle the growing threat they pose by protecting what we need. It’s important to scale down where we can and do business where We can’t. We don’t want conflict. But we have to protect ourselves with our eyes wide open.”
China’s state-run Global Times editorialized that the ban will only “strengthen China’s will and ability to be self-sufficient in science and technology.” Bloomberg quoted an unnamed Chinese analyst as saying “there is no possibility of reconciliation”.
Welcome to the future.
With a wealth of experience honed over 4+ years in journalism, I bring a seasoned voice to the world of news. Currently, I work as a freelance writer and editor, always seeking new opportunities to tell compelling stories in the field of world news.
