By Dan Strumpf The Trump administration is adding China s largest manufacturer of computing chips to an export blacklist, restricting the company s access to high-end technology over its alleged links it to the Chinese military. Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp., or SMIC, will be added alongside more than 60 other Chinese institutions to the entity list, the Commerce Department said. The designation restricts companies from exporting U.S.-origin technology to the listed firms without a license, with a provision that effectively prohibits SMIC from acquiring technology to build chips with 10-nanometer circuits and smaller, the industry s top class of chips. The move raises the pressure significantly on the chip maker, a national champion that has received billions of dollars in state backing and is central to Beijing s drive to improve the country s self-sufficiency in critical technologies. It comes during the waning weeks of the Trump administratio
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FAIRFIELD-SUISUN, CALIFORNIA
The most important company you’ve never heard of is being dragged into the U.S.-China rivalry [Los Angeles Times]
It’s been called Taiwan’s Silicon Shield, and without it much of modern life would cease.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., or TSMC, makes more than half the world’s contracted semiconductor chips and lies at the center of the technology supply chain, churning out circuitry found in iPhones, Amazon cloud computers, graphics processors that power popular video games and even military drones and fighter jets like Lockheed Martin’s F-35.
But TSMC is confronting problems it had never anticipated when a Taiwanese American engineer, who spent 25 years at Texas Instruments and is revered here like a hometown Bill Gates, founded it in the late 1980s. The company has been drawn into an increasingly bitter and at times dangerous rivalry between the U.S. and China that is forcing nations and corporations to choose sides in an era
A series about the effect China’s global power is having on nations and people’s lives. Washington this month blacklisted Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp., accusing it of being a front for the Chinese military and cutting it off from American equipment and investment. That raises the specter of Chinese retaliation against an American company such as Apple, which would in turn hurt TSMC.
Beijing’s suggestion that it might invade Taiwan and return it to Chinese dominion could further imperil TSMC’s freedom. China has long yearned for a company as advanced as TSMC. It has invested billions of dollars and poached hundreds of Taiwanese engineers in a national Manhattan Project-like bid to catch up to Taiwan, South Korea and the U.S. Despite those efforts, China remains years behind and must import all but 15% of its semiconductors, spending more on the technology than on foreign crude oil each year.