For years, the U.S. government has imposed similar export controls on China aimed at limiting its ability to mint advanced silicon, but these restrictions also prevent Huawei from building large-scale AI models. It appears that nothing could have prevented the development of a competitive chip for training.
The Chinese tech giant was temporarily crippled by U.S. sanctions six months ago. Sample sent According to the South China Morning Post, the company’s latest AI training chip, called Ascend, was made available to customers in September this year. Companies testing Ascend reportedly include TikTok’s Chinese parent company ByteDance. I was told that I was in training Large models that primarily use Ascend. Baidu, which manufactures one of China’s leading search engines and developed an autonomous driving system, recently I ordered a Huawei chip. According to Reuters, the transition from US semiconductor giant Nvidia is progressing. (NVIDIA declined to comment.)
Export restrictions aimed at curbing China’s AI field began under the first Trump administration. In 2019, several emerging Chinese AI companies were added to the Entity List, meaning U.S. companies, including chipmakers like Nvidia, will need to obtain special licenses to do business with them. . This was followed by restrictions on the sale of chips made with American technology to Huawei, China’s dominant telecommunications company and major smartphone maker.
The Biden administration tightened regulations in October 2022, restricting exports of cutting-edge GPU chips to China, including those made by Nvidia, in an effort to curb Chinese companies’ ability to train the most powerful AI models. This measure is aimed at The rules were tightened a year later to close loopholes that still allowed Chinese companies to access some advanced chips.
The impact of U.S. semiconductor sanctions can be difficult to gauge, and some experts believe the restrictions are not encouraging China to make even more rapid advances in semiconductor manufacturing itself, reducing its dependence on U.S. companies. I have doubts.
Late 2023, Huawei Introducing the Mate 60a smartphone equipped with an advanced chip from Chinese chipmaker SMIC. The announcement caused a stir in Washington because it signaled that SMIC had made significant strides in advancing its proprietary manufacturing technology. (Further analysis shows that Huawei and SMIC remain foreign suppliers. )
but, Report published The Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, argued this week that before the U.S. government began tightening access to advanced semiconductors, the Chinese government had already begun increasing investment in domestic semiconductor manufacturing. He also noted that China has made significant progress in areas that are not subject to export controls, such as manufacturing solar cells and electric vehicles.
