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Why America Is Losing the Tech War with China
(nationalinterest.org)
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this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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Before sanctions, Huawei was the world's largest telecom equipment vendor.
After sanctions, Huawei is still the largest except they barely have any US chips in their products.
The CHIPS act has always been incredibly questionable. It seemingly goes against market forces. The US are alienating what were potentially the largest customers for all the chips they plan on making. Customers are especially scarce at the higher end processes that the US are targeting.
Global Foundries abandoned 7nm since they believed that most of their clients wouldn't be able to afford migrating to leading edge nodes. UMC barely had any clients for their 14nm process. Not even Global Foundries' contractual obligations to AMD / IBM, UMC's connection to Mediatek, and access to the latest ASML EUV machines were enough incentive for them to transition to 7nm and beyond.
The US essentially made Huawei a guaranteed customer to SMIC. EUV isn't even necessary for 7nm and 7nm isn't necessary for 5G. Intel 7 and TSMC N7, N7P are made with DUV. TSMC's 12nm was used for UNISOC's Makalu 5G modem and one of their 5G SOCs. The delay in making 5G phones might just be Huawei needing EDA tools to design a modem using SMIC's existing processes.
The way the sanctions are so gradual it's almost as if the US wants China's chip sector to undergo import substitution industrialization. It really resembles the slow ramp up of import restrictions that established the automobile industry in many countries. It's also kind of amusing that in practice it's the US that are cutting themselves off from advanced tech while China can still by the latest chips. Nvidia made the A800, and H800 just for China.. Nvidia probably lobbied to make the restriction easy to implement and based on the specification that affects performance the least.
US bans Huawei so there stuck with 4.5G marketed at 5G.
US bans DJI drones in government so they use terrible Skydio drones for search and rescue.
I'm still undecided if the hype for the 5G AI driven "Fourth Industrial Revolution" is warranted though.
Fuck no it isn't. It's a useful tool, but it's not anywhere near the level of being able to truly change the world like electricity (or any other equivalently huge invention) imo. Biggest problem is how good visual and audio faking has gotten, we already have a big problem with people falling for facebook minion memes, seeing videos of government officials say they eat babies is going to break people's brains to a never before seen degree
Oh well, at least the hype is distracting the US from attacking the more productive sectors China's economy. US government officials really seem fixated on whatever the current tech buzzword is.
Honestly, the self-driving car hype train from a decade ago made me a bit skeptical about the newest AI wave. In spite of the absolutely massive gains Nvidia's machine learning chips have made, Full Self-Driving is perpetually coming next year according to Tesla.
And the sad thing is that the self-driving vision is mostly about "how do we automate away an already precarious group of taxi/rideshare/lorry drivers."
Notice there's little discussion about automation as an efficiency tool (networking to smooth traffic flow, automatically draft for efficiency, schedule fleet vehicles for maximum utilization) Probably because trains already do it all better.
It's all either economic titans trying to own the space so they can invent dodgy new business models, or wrapping it for consumers as the same old self-indulgent car pap, almighty individual in his overpowered FreedomPod(tm) but now he can play Candy Crush instead of watching for pedestrians.
and honestly no matter how good you make self driving cars, they will always be inferior to trains, which China has plenty of! (although even they are still too carbrained, some of their highways are actual abominations
I kind of wonder, if “Buy America” wasn't a requirement and the US allowed China to bid for High Speed Rail contracts would the US already have decent HSR network by now?
No, the automobile lobby is too strong here. The US used to have an extremely strong railway network before the automobile industrialists destroyed it, and they won’t be letting their cashcow go that easily
And I'm pretty sure the problem is going to be tackled in China while having disastrous effects in the West and all they're gonna say is "ChyNa indErnEt cenSrorShip otoRitarIan"
I'm not even sure China will have to do that much, people there already actually trust the government and its institutions generally, at least much more than Amerikkkans or Europeans do,
Considering western Gamers called China fascist for solving gaming addiction, you're not wrong. The spiritual opium is strong