The US government has imposed similar export controls on China for years, aiming to limit its ability to produce advanced silicon, but the controls have apparently not stopped Huawei from developing competing chips for training large AI models.
The Chinese tech giant, which was temporarily crippled by US sanctions half a decade ago, sent samples of its latest AI training chip, called Ascend, to customers in September, according to the South China Morning Post. The companies testing Ascend reportedly include ByteDance, TikTok's Chinese parent company, which is reportedly training a large model primarily using Ascend. Baidu, China's leading search engine and which has developed autonomous driving systems, recently placed an order for Huawei's chips, in a shift from U.S. chip giant Nvidia, according to Reuters. (Nvidia declined to comment.)
Export restrictions aimed at curbing China's AI sector began under the first Trump administration. In 2019, several emerging Chinese AI companies were added to the Entity List, meaning US companies, including chipmakers like Nvidia, would have to get a special license to do business with them. This was followed by restrictions on sales of chips made with US technology to Huawei, China's dominant telecom company and a leading smartphone manufacturer.
The Biden administration in October 2022 tightened controls and restricted exports to China of cutting-edge GPU chips, including those from Nvidia, a move aimed at limiting the ability of any Chinese company to train the most powerful AI models curb. The rules were tightened a year later to close loopholes that still allowed Chinese companies access to some advanced chips.
It can be difficult to gauge the impact of the U.S. chip sanctions, and some experts wonder whether the controls will push China to make faster progress in chip production itself, reducing its dependence on U.S. companies.
At the end of 2023, Huawei unveiled the Mate 60, a smartphone with an advanced chip from the Chinese chip maker SMIC. The announcement caused an uproar in Washington because it suggested that SMIC had made significant progress in advancing its own manufacturing techniques. (Further analysis indicated that Huawei and SMIC were still dependent on foreign suppliers.)
But a report published this week by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington DC-based think tank, argued that the Chinese government had already begun ramping up investment in domestic chip production before the US government blocked China's access country until the Chinese economy began to decline. 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.
