Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company suspended shipments to China-based chip designer Sophgo after a chip it made was found on a Huawei AI processor, according to two people familiar with the matter.
Sophgo had ordered chips from TSMC that matched the one found on Huawei’s Ascend 910B, the people said. Huawei is restricted from buying the technology to protect U.S. national security. Reuters could not determine how the chip ended up on the Huawei product.
Tech research firm TechInsights discovered the TSMC chip on Huawei’s Ascend 910B when it took apart the multi-chip processor, a different source told Reuters on Tuesday. Alerted to the finding, about two weeks ago TSMC notified the U.S., the source said.
Reuters could not determine how the chip ended up on the Huawei product.
Try to make an educated guess…
Duct tape?
How do US restrictions factor in here? TSMC is a Taiwanese company with only one operational plant in the US, the majority are in Taiwan, China, and Japan.
The US is the primary military force protecting Taiwan, by treaty. That’s likely why.
They could ignore sanctions but that would mean they’d be sanctioned as well. Pretty much every manufacturer and financial institution has to obey laws in multiple jurisdictions if they want to operate within those markets.
Would the USA actually sanction TSMC though? Wouldn’t that be a massive blow to companies like apple?
They need asml lithography equipment without which they are a nothing burger and to get that you need to play nice with US and EU.
Lithography but also clients like Apple, Intel, AMD and so on. Without them they’re also toast. World today is so interconnected that at large scale it’s really hard not to be compliant with sanctions.
There is likely a lot of US tech in that chip. TSMC is just a fab, they don’t have a lot of their own technology, they buy thousands of pieces of tech from all over the world to make their chips. A lot of that comes from the US.
Yes, but it would be an even bigger blow to TSMC if all US companies would stop buying from them. I’m pretty sure nvidia, AMD and Apple make a very sizable part of their customer base.
Not really. China would just buy it all if given the chance and the US companies would be fucked, since TSMC is practically a monopoly within its field at the moment.
It’s not as easy, as TSMC needs ASML hardware, which wouldn’t sell it to TSMC anymore because they also want to sell to US companies.
Countries willing to pass on a US patent to China stop getting the chips (or, in this case, chip-making jobs, realistically, but that still hurts)
Also Taiwan doesn’t wanna help China and even if a US sanction was just an excuse to hurt China and get away with it they’d probably do it.
Edit: in this case, this chip is “foreign-produced items […] that are the direct product of U.S. technology or software”, according to the article. I feel it was implied but clarity is always good. US technology, used with permission in a Taiwanese good, and that permission could be retracted.
When I read “processor” in this context, I’m usually thinking of a discrete component. Wat?
I could understand being surprised to find a certain processor in a chip, but how y’all fitting chips in processors? I’m guessing that this is just another tech “journalism” failure.
https://asiatimes.com/2024/10/huawei-uses-tsmc-loophole-to-bypass-us-chip-ban/
There’s a semi-realistic graphic in that article. You can see multiple components in one package.
Besides, CPUs have had integrated GPUs for years now. I’m not sure why you’d be surprised to hear about separate multiple processor chips inside one big processor package.
You don’t seem to understand what I’m saying.
I’d be surprised to find a Cortex M0 in an SoC that billed itself as having a Cortex M33, for example.
A System on a Chip can often have a CPU, GPU, and other subprocessors all on one die, but multiple chips on a processor is backwards.
So… you’re saying calling a productized die a “chip” is inappropriate? I think you’d be in the minority.
Sorry about your illiteracy
