Companies from China that achieve some degree of commercial success outside the country are often targeted by US sanctions. Huawei Technologies, ByteDance with its TikTok service, and more recently SMIC, the list of examples could certainly go on. At the same time, experts believe that the US at this stage is not ready to invest in the development of national production.
The administrative resource at this stage works efficiently and does not require special investments. Huawei first lost the opportunity to receive its HiSilicon brand processors from TSMC, and now the US is ready to ban the supply of any components manufactured using American technology or equipment to the Chinese giant. Lest Huawei be accustomed to seek shelter on the assembly line of the Chinese contractor SMIC, the latter's activities have also recently come under critical scrutiny from US regulators.
ΠΠ°ΠΊ CSIS expert James Andrew Lewis, the US approach to maintaining its technological hegemony cannot be called far-sighted. Lewis himself worked in the US Department of Commerce in the past, so he has some moral right to talk about such matters. The expert believes that the biggest problem for the United States in this confrontation with China is the lack of desire on the part of the American authorities to spend serious funds on the development of national production. Relevant initiatives are indeed being discussed by the government, but so far they remain mostly on paper, and the amounts included in the projects seem ridiculous.
A CSIS spokesperson explains that China could outsell the US in semiconductor investment by three orders of magnitude, at a ratio of "1000 to 1." Such a disproportion leaves not the highest chances for the United States to win this race. Of course, China still lags behind the United States in terms of high-tech development by a decade, but the motivation of the Chinese authorities to close this gap should not be underestimated. As soon as US pressure on private companies from China increased, local authorities began to invest much more actively in the development of the national semiconductor industry. The same SMIC began to receive large subsidies for the development of new technologies and the expansion of production. By the middle of the decade, China expects to master 7nm lithography, and major domestic market players such as SMIC and YMTC are preparing to test production lines that do not use American equipment.
China has realized, according to Lewis, that global leadership in technology increases the country's influence on the international stage, and therefore is unlikely to give up its ambitions to rise to the top of the hierarchy. In this sense, the United States itself suggested the vector of development to its political opponent, but so far they do not realize the vulnerability of their position at the current levels of funding.
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Source: 3dnews.ru