I’d argue we’re at the point where there’s nothing the west can do. Chinese domestic chips are still a couple of generations behind, but the fact of the matter is that it simply doesn’t matter. The only place where bleeding edge chips are really important is in stuff like mobile devices where battery life is a key factor. For applications like data centers, you can just use more older chips to boost performance. It’s less efficient, but it will work fine as a stopgap measure. On top of that, legacy chips are what’s used for vast majority of applications like cars, appliances, robotics, etc. If the US goes nuclear and cuts off chip supply to China entirely, then all that’s going to do is accelerate the process of western chip companies going under.
The other thing to note is that we’re hitting limits of silicon because there’s nowhere to go past 1nm or so. At this point you have to make massive investments to get meager improvements on this substrate. This is why China’s efforts into developing stuff like carbon based chips are so interesting to watch. A new substrate could make silicon look like vacuum tubes overnight, and then there will be decades of improvements down the road. We might get chips that are both orders of magnitude faster and more power efficient as these things go hand in hand. If that happens China will pull ahead in ways that are simply unimaginable. They’d be able to process data on a scale that’s simply impossible with current tech.
Meanwhile, we can already see from the tariff war that pretty much nobody will go along with the US on banning Chinese chips. Canada might, but at this point even Europe looks doubtful. The rest of the world will be a hard no. We can see that happening with solar panels and EVs already. The US is headed towards becoming a hermit kingdom, which will be cut out of global technology stack dominated by China.
This will have huge repercussions because the US will be cut out of standards like 10G internet, and GPMI which will become dominant across the world. It’s going to become harder for US firms to collaborate with others, establish supply chains for their legacy tech, and so on.
The west absolutely does not have any high ground controlling major software or operating systems. I work in the industry, and I can tell you for a fact that pretty much all critical software infrastructure is open source and Linux based. I’m sure there are niche applications for stuff like CNC milling and so on that might only be produced by one company in the west, but these will be few and far between. China has also been intentionally encouraging domestic platforms to develop instead of relying on US based tech. That was the whole point of the firewall. It’s why China has stuff like TikTok and XHS. If anything, China is now more advanced in terms of software with stuff like WeChat which is a comprehensive platform that has no equivalent in the west. It’s not like China just woke up yesterday and realized there was a threat of software dominance by the west. They knew this to be the case for a long time, and have been actively working to mitigate it.
Very much agree regarding the security risk of backdoors, and this is why I think China should’ve been far more aggressive in phasing out western tech, especially on the hardware front.
I’d argue we’re at the point where there’s nothing the west can do. Chinese domestic chips are still a couple of generations behind, but the fact of the matter is that it simply doesn’t matter. The only place where bleeding edge chips are really important is in stuff like mobile devices where battery life is a key factor. For applications like data centers, you can just use more older chips to boost performance. It’s less efficient, but it will work fine as a stopgap measure. On top of that, legacy chips are what’s used for vast majority of applications like cars, appliances, robotics, etc. If the US goes nuclear and cuts off chip supply to China entirely, then all that’s going to do is accelerate the process of western chip companies going under.
The other thing to note is that we’re hitting limits of silicon because there’s nowhere to go past 1nm or so. At this point you have to make massive investments to get meager improvements on this substrate. This is why China’s efforts into developing stuff like carbon based chips are so interesting to watch. A new substrate could make silicon look like vacuum tubes overnight, and then there will be decades of improvements down the road. We might get chips that are both orders of magnitude faster and more power efficient as these things go hand in hand. If that happens China will pull ahead in ways that are simply unimaginable. They’d be able to process data on a scale that’s simply impossible with current tech.
Meanwhile, we can already see from the tariff war that pretty much nobody will go along with the US on banning Chinese chips. Canada might, but at this point even Europe looks doubtful. The rest of the world will be a hard no. We can see that happening with solar panels and EVs already. The US is headed towards becoming a hermit kingdom, which will be cut out of global technology stack dominated by China.
This will have huge repercussions because the US will be cut out of standards like 10G internet, and GPMI which will become dominant across the world. It’s going to become harder for US firms to collaborate with others, establish supply chains for their legacy tech, and so on.
The west absolutely does not have any high ground controlling major software or operating systems. I work in the industry, and I can tell you for a fact that pretty much all critical software infrastructure is open source and Linux based. I’m sure there are niche applications for stuff like CNC milling and so on that might only be produced by one company in the west, but these will be few and far between. China has also been intentionally encouraging domestic platforms to develop instead of relying on US based tech. That was the whole point of the firewall. It’s why China has stuff like TikTok and XHS. If anything, China is now more advanced in terms of software with stuff like WeChat which is a comprehensive platform that has no equivalent in the west. It’s not like China just woke up yesterday and realized there was a threat of software dominance by the west. They knew this to be the case for a long time, and have been actively working to mitigate it.
Very much agree regarding the security risk of backdoors, and this is why I think China should’ve been far more aggressive in phasing out western tech, especially on the hardware front.