The U.S. government has imposed similar export controls on China for years, aimed at limiting its ability to mint advanced silicon, but the controls apparently haven’t stopped Huawei from developing competing chips to train immense artificial intelligence models.
The Chinese technology giant, temporarily paralyzed half a decade ago by American sanctions, sent samples According to The South China Morning Post, the latest AI training chip, called Ascend, will be delivered to customers in September this year. Companies testing Ascend reportedly include ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent he said he was training a immense model using mainly Ascend. Baidu, which is a leading search engine in China and has recently developed autonomous driving systems placed an order for Huawei chips According to Reuters, this marks a departure from US chip giant Nvidia. (Nvidia declined to comment.)
Export restrictions aimed at curbing China’s artificial intelligence sector began during the first Trump administration. In 2019, several up-and-coming Chinese artificial intelligence companies were added to the entity list, meaning US companies, including chipmakers such as Nvidia, will need to obtain a special license to do business with them. Subsequently, restrictions were introduced on the sale of chips made with American technology to Huawei, the dominant Chinese telecommunications operator and leading smartphone manufacturer.
The Biden administration tightened controls in October 2022, restricting exports to China of cutting-edge GPU chips, including those made by Nvidia, in a move aimed at limiting the ability of any Chinese company to train the most powerful artificial intelligence models. A year later, rules were tightened to plug loopholes that still allowed Chinese companies access to some advanced chips.
Assessing the impact of U.S. chip sanctions may be arduous, and some experts question whether the controls are encouraging China to make faster progress in chip production itself, reducing its dependence on U.S. companies.
At the end of 2023, Huawei presented Mate 60a smartphone equipped with an advanced chip from the Chinese chip manufacturer SMIC. The statement caused a stir in Washington because it suggested that SMIC had made significant progress in refining its own production techniques. (Further analysis showed that Huawei and SMIC were still dependent on foreign suppliers.)
But published report this week by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank, argued that the Chinese government had already begun increasing investment in domestic chip production before the U.S. government began restricting the country’s access to advanced semiconductors. It also noted that China has made greater progress in sectors not subject to export controls, such as solar cell and electric vehicle production.