Export Controls Failed to Keep Cutting-Edge AI Chips from China’s Huawei

TAIPEI, Taiwan — A few weeks ago, analysts at a specialized technological lab put a microchip from China under a powerful microscope. Something didn’t look right.

Figuring out where a tiny electronic chip was made is a bit like trying to authenticate a painting. A trained art appraiser can tell its provenance by brushstrokes, the signature, the chemical composition of pigments. For chips, details like the microscopic layout and material makeup of the transistors are telltale signs of which foundry produced it.

The microscopic proof was there that a chunk of the electronic components from Chinese high-tech champion Huawei Technologies had been produced by the world’s most advanced chipmaker, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. That was a problem because two U.S. administrations in succession had taken actions to assure that didn’t happen.
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The technology’s presence in a Chinese champion’s products underscores the challenges for the U.S. government as it attempts to slow China’s AI development by reaching beyond U.S. borders to police the activities of companies using American technology like TSMC.

“It raises some fundamental questions about how well we can actually enforce these rules,” said Emily Kilcrease, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security in Washington.

Read the full article and more on The Washington Post.