The Commerce Department on Tuesday updated and broadened its export controls to stop China from acquiring advanced computer chips and the equipment to manufacture them.
The revisions come roughly a year after the export controls were first launched to counter the use of the chips for military applications that include the development of hypersonic missiles and artificial intelligence.
“These export controls are intended to protect technologies that have clear national security or human rights implications,” Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said on a call with reporters. “The vast majority of semiconductors will remain unrestricted. But when we identify national security or human rights threats, we will act decisively and in concert with our allies.”
Advanced chip making is one of if not the most complicated and cost intensive manufacturing processes in the world. It’s not something you can just throw a team of geniuses onto and have them spit out a product in a couple of years. It’s not that China is incapable, they would just need to spend a lot of time and money investing in R&D, the same thing companies like TSMC had to do. They’re already doing that, but in the meantime the United States is trying to protect their competitive edge.
Yeah, the West kept semiconductor technology away from the Soviets for years and even though the Soviets managed ways of importing it through grey markets in other countries, their reverse-engineering attempts were consistently a decade or more behind the West, something that’s continued to this day in Russia.