Watching the US State Destroy the Western Chip Industry in Slow Motion
A friend of mine sent me the following New York Times article on the US government efforts to keep China trapped in the middle-income trap through removing access to key technologies that the US/West has control of - in this case microchips. It is a great example of the blowback from the incredible combination of ignorance and arrogance of the US policy elites. At the same time, the US and Canadian governments are making things difficult for the very foreign technology post-docs and professors that are central to the development of new technologies in those two countries!
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/12/magazine/semiconductor-chips-us-china.html
My reply:
The sheer stupidity and arrogance of the US never ceases to amaze! Until the mid-2010s China had no issue completely relying on US and Western chips. Since the ongoing war by the US to stop the economic development of China from the mid-2010s onwards, including the destruction of Huawei's handset business when it threatened Apple, China has funded multiple "Manhattan Projects" to make sure that they are not limited this way. One of them is in AI (they are probably already ahead), another is in chips where they will probably catch up by the end of this decade. Let's remember that the West has constantly underestimated China (and Japan before that).
The vast majority of applications do not need the most advanced chipsets and even in many of the most advanced cases you can simply use two chips instead of one with greater energy consumption and cooling issues. China has already been able to manufacture 14nm chips and SMIC has shown that it can make 7 nm chips by manipulating 14 nm technology. The military never uses leading edge chips, they are usually 2-3 generations behind given the length of the military development cycle - 7nm will be military leading edge into the 2030s. So, China has lots of time to catch up without any significant impacts. In the meantime, Western chipmakers will lose increasing chunks of their revenue (China buys more than 1/3rd of all chips in the world) and in the end face a massive Chinese chip industry that was only created because of US sanctions.
The limit of current electronic chips is probably 2nm, then they will need to start moving to opto-electronic chips. That is a completely different paradigm with completely different technologies through which China can leapfrog. In a way they may have an advantage, as in many cases the incumbents in one paradigm (e.g. internal combustion engine cars) get beaten by newcomers in the next paradigm (e.g. EVs). Ten years from now we may be looking at the domination of the chip industry by China, all because of US sanctions. Another case of blowback from utterly ignorant and arrogant Western actions! And in the interim China will take retaliatory actions with respect to critical minerals required for chip production etc.
Afghanistan is back under the Taliban, Iraq is an ally of Iran, Iran and Saudi Arabia have reconciled, Syria and Saudi Arabia have reconciled, a number of players look set to kick the US out of Syria, the Ruble is certainly not rubble, and the US and Western wunderwaffe have been shown to be pretty pathetic by the Russian army (e.g. all those glorious burning Leopard tanks and shot-down HIMARS missiles). The Biden administration makes the Trump administration look nearly competent. Oh, and Russia, China and Iran are in an ever-tightening alliance.