Advanced Chips to China could cripple Chinese suppliers?

[Arthur Hanson]

Letting China buy advanced chips at this point could cripple Chinese companies and could benefit the foreign makers, could this be a reality of commercial warfare that has been going on for years? Should we support embargoes that allow/force China to build up a substantial and competitive high-tech industry? Any thoughts or comments appreciated.

 

[Xebec]

I think it could be a 'wash' in terms of slowing them down.

China developed it's own WiFi standards, a few years after using 'foreign' WiFi chips to power it's networks. They did this to reduce reliance on foreign technology, promote "social harmony" through control of communications, and to reduce the cost of networking in China.

Some years later they did exactly the same with CPUs -- both with their fully internally developed CPUs (certainly a combo fo home-grown and stolen IP), and then later enhanced it via a licensing agreement with AMD for a version of the first Zen architecture.

China is certainly advancing it's own ability to build advanced memory types too.

These products were never restricted in any meaningful way for export to China, and they developed them domestically anyway for various reasons.

If we exported advanced chips - we'd make some more money and maybe slow down their domestic output. OTOH, in theory, the more we sell them the more readily they'll be able to clone it - especially really hard stuff like EUV machines from ASML.

So I think it doesn't really matter too much in the long run, basically if a company wants to profit off of Chinese buyers -- they need to innovate more quickly than China, and be allowed to export. Otherwise, China will just eventually domestically source the supply anyway, even if it's not the same quality or capability.

..

P.S. We also need to rework some of our own licensing and patent laws. It's a very long story, and not entirely related to patents -- but it was a licensing agreement within the Canada and the US for Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries that handed China absolute dominance in the production of EV and home storage batteries. Also note - I think ideally China should produce some things the US can't and vice-versa -- then we can trade, and.. have peace through mutual dependancy.