U.S. Ban on Huawei Seen Widening China Chip War

By Alan Patterson, EETimes (February 3, 2023)

An imminent ban on U.S. exports to Huawei is seen as the first volley in a new wave of restrictions that will impair China’s semiconductor, AI and quantum computing industries—all critical for tech dominance in military and commercial realms.

The administration of U.S. President Joe Biden has stopped licensing U.S. companies to export to Huawei as Washington aims for a total ban on sales of U.S. technology to the Chinese telecom equipment giant, the Financial Times reported this week, citing people inside the White House familiar with the plan.

China’s largest chipmakers like Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. (SMIC) and Yangtze Memory Technologies Corp. (YMTC), and even smaller domestic rivals like Hua Hong Semiconductor, will face more impediments to their growth from the new restrictions, sources told EE Times.

“The new end-use controls are structured to automatically catch other Chinese companies, say Hua Hong, that want to move up the value-added/technology scale and work at 14 nm,” said Paul Triolo, a China tech expert at Washington D.C. business consultancy Albright Stonebridge. “The whole system is set up to automatically keep China behind at a fixed technology level, per [U.S. National Security Advisor] Jake Sullivan’s comments in October that the U.S. would no longer use a ‘sliding scale’ in attempting to keep U.S. companies leading in their respective sectors.”

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