Experts: US chip curbs on Huawei doomed to fail

Washington's latest attempt to ban the use of Huawei Technologies Co's Ascend artificial intelligence chips "anywhere in the world" is an unprecedented government-initiated crackdown on a Chinese private company, experts said.

Such efforts are doomed to fail as China's semiconductor industry, tempered by years of US sanctions, now boasts a near-complete supply chain, and previous Washington restrictions have ironically catalyzed China's progress in chips, they added.

The comments came after the US Commerce Department issued guidance on Tuesday stating that the use of Huawei Technologies Co's Ascend artificial intelligence chips "anywhere in the world" violates the government's export controls, escalating US efforts to curb technological advances in China.

He Hui, semiconductor research director at UK-based tech research company Omdia, said the latest move will accelerate China's efforts to build tech supply chains independent of US technologies.

"Despite the harsh rhetoric from Washington, the rule is more like building an anti-Huawei atmosphere than to really implement it. After all, many Chinese companies are using Huawei's AI chips and what else can the US government do to further punish them, given that most of them have already been put on its blacklist, " she said.

Xiang Ligang, director-general of the Zhongguancun Modern Information Consumer Application Industry Technology Alliance, a telecom industry association, said the latest move underlines once again that the US government is using all means to contain the rise of Chinese technologies, but such efforts are doomed to fail.

"Previous restrictions ironically catalyzed China's progress in chips. The latest move will play the same role in helping Huawei emerge stronger," Xiang added.

Wei Shaojun, president of the integrated circuit design branch of the China Semiconductor Industry Association, said: "The more others suppress us, the more we need to be self-reliant. But self-reliance does not mean self-isolation. It is about finding ways to break the containment."

"China needs to promote the re-globalization of the semiconductor industry by achieving self-reliance on crucial technologies as well as by teaming up with countries and enterprises that are willing to cooperate," said Wei.

Many Chinese companies are embracing Huawei's chips for AI training, because Washington bans exports by US companies, such as Nvidia's advanced chips, to China.

Chinese AI pioneer iFlytek, for instance, has said its proprietary deep reasoning model Spark X1 is the industry's only large language model trained entirely on China's domestic computational infrastructure.

iFlytek said it is partnering with Huawei's AI chip research team to create better domestic computing solutions for AI training, and that Spark X1 demonstrates significant improvements across general AI tasks, including mathematics, coding, logical reasoning, text generation, language understanding and knowledge-based Q&A.

Last month, Nvidia and AMD said they need to follow new US licensing requirements for semiconductors exported to China.

Nvidia anticipates that the new regulations would lead to a $5.5 billion financial hit, while AMD estimates the rules could reduce its earnings by as much as $800 million, as reported in filings submitted to the US Securities and Exchange Commission.