The US government has been imposing similar export controls on China aimed at limiting its ability to produce advanced silicon for years, but the controls apparently did not stop Huawei from developing competitive chips for training large AI models.
The Chinese tech giant, which was temporarily paralyzed by US sanctions half a decade ago, samples sent of its latest AI training chip, called Ascend, to customers in September, according to The South China Morning Post. Companies reportedly testing Ascend include ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent, which is it is said that he is training a large model primarily used by Ascend. Baidu, which makes China’s main search engine and has developed autonomous driving systems, recently placed an order for Huawei chips in a move away from US chip giant Nvidia, according to Reuters. (Nvidia declined to comment.)
Export restrictions aimed at curbing China’s AI sector began under the first Trump administration. In 2019, several promising Chinese AI companies were added to the entity list, meaning that American companies, including chipmakers like Nvidia, would have to obtain a special license to do business with them. This was followed by restrictions on sales of chips made with American technology to Huawei, China’s dominant telecommunications company and a leading smartphone maker.
The Biden administration tightened controls in October 2022, limiting exports to China of next-generation GPU chips, including those made by Nvidia, a move aimed at curbing the ability of any Chinese company to train the most powerful AI models. The rules were tightened a year later to close loopholes that still allowed Chinese companies to access some advanced chips.
It can be difficult to measure the impact of U.S. chip sanctions, and some experts question whether the controls are prompting China to make faster advances in chip manufacturing, reducing its dependence on U.S. companies.
By the end of 2023, Huawei introduced the Mate 60a smartphone that features an advanced chip from Chinese chipmaker SMIC. The announcement caused a stir in Washington because it suggested that SMIC had made substantial progress in advancing its own manufacturing techniques. (Further analysis indicated that Huawei and SMIC were still dependent on foreign suppliers.)
but a published report This week, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, argued that the Chinese government had already begun increasing investment in domestic chip manufacturing before the U.S. government began restricting the country’s access to advanced semiconductors. He also noted that China has made greater progress in sectors not subject to export controls, such as solar cell and electric vehicle manufacturing.