China Turns Legacy Chips Into a Trade Weapon

When Trump The administration was trying to make a ticket deal during a meeting with China last weekend, busy adding its own bid chip to the Beijing table. The actual chips, in reality – Sikaducter.

Last week, China unveiled multiple regulatory activities by targeting American chipmerers. Most significant American legacy chips are an anti-dumping investigation that gives all the strength from the car and the refrigerator to washing machine and data center. Unlike the Cutting-Ez GPUs, these chips rarely produce titles, but they are necessary to strengthen daily electronics. Seriously, this is a region where Chinese companies have been captured. American companies alleged that the Chinese regulators are opening tariff doors with cheap legacy chips, which will make American products less competitive.

Then there was an incredible step against Nvidia. China’s market regulator Declaration Initial inquiries that suggest that the company violated the promises made during the acquisition of 2020 of the Israeli company Melanox. After the day, Report to the Financial Times China’s CyberSspace Administration told Byrights and Alibaba to stop buying the latest chips in Nvidia. And finally, Beijing also launched anti -discriminatory investigation into US trade and industrial policy, accusing Washington unjust support for its own chipmakers like Intel Subsidies of Chips Law And tariffs.

Anyone who followed the last five years of the US-China Technology War, all of this seems to be familiar-but on the opposite side. Previously, Washington invented new equipment to suppress China’s access to advanced semiconductor: export control, tariffs, investment reviews and even employees. Now, after a few years of defense, China has shown that it is ready to use the same equipment kit against its mainland opponent. At the minimum, the threat of American chip companies threatens to give Chinese representatives a leverage for a better deal on tickets and tariffs on tariffs.

“The Chinese have always been very good students in the United States. Now we can see that they have the confidence and sophistication of kindly reply,” Say and moneyWriter Breakneck: China’s search for future engineers And a research fellow of the Hoover Institution.

New chips on the table

The time of these probes is rarely a mystery. Talking about an agreement to continue the United States in the United States – and it can partially brought under American control. Unlike Washington, which is consumed on the question of how the app can best control the app, Beijing itself thinks very little about Tikatok’s fate. What is important to the Chinese government is whether it can trade the approval of a possible agreement for exemption elsewhere, for example related to tariff or export control.

Semiconductor, which is becoming more politically important a day, is a major goal. “Beijing is important to achieve the technologies needed to create advanced semiconductor in its semiconductor industry, especially for training large language models and allowing innovation in the AI ​​sector,” is less concerned than, “less concerned, than that.”

This week, counter -measures suggest that Beijing has identified a new point of leverage: China’s huge domestic market. The United States was able to remove export controls because the companies of the United States and allied countries still control the cutting-ed technology needed to create semiconductors: ASML’s Lithography Machine, Nvidia GPU and TSMC Foundries. There is no equivalent of Beijing Chokahold, perhaps except for EarthThe However, what China is in is a huge customer and the base of the production. For example, China has the largest automotive market in the world, which requires a few billion imported auto chips every year. With the desire to arms access to that market, it is borrowing a page from Trump’s playbook.