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From /u/gwern (@gwern ?): analysis on China’s semiconductor industry.
Recent export controls are directly targeting the Chinese ability to fabricate cutting-edge chips. The subsequent effect on electronics prices and the much-maligned supply chain won’t be pleasant—especially for China, and especially if their industry is already slumping. Consequences for the rest of the world are left as an exercise to the reader.
Given the forum, it’s not surprising that the focus is on AI. I’m more interested in the geopolitical outlook. This is an incentive to retaliate, perhaps even against the other regional semiconductor fabricator. And it is suggested that the timing is a calculated insult to Chinese leadership, as they are apparently going through a periodic dog-and-pony show of elections. Gwern suggests that China would otherwise be raising hell.
The counterpart in US domestic politics: crunching semiconductor supply will not mix well with inflation. I don’t think adding $50 to the next iPhone will make or break Democrats, but it seems unlikely to help.
I want to place predictions, but I don’t have a good grasp of the metrics involved. Place your bets, I guess, for:
China taking economic action
China taking military action
Consequences on Chinese industry
Tech policy towards China becoming a wedge issue in American politics
The Chinese do not want decoupling. All their actions have shown this abundantly clearly. As such, I suspect their reaction will be muted.
As for Taiwan, it has become a prestige issue but everyone knows whether or not China controls the island makes little concrete difference. The US isn't going to invade the Chinese mainland and there are questions whether the US can even defend the island given the massive missile arsenal of the Chinese that would make life utter hell for any navy fleet trying to intervene. And of course, all this ignores the massive navy that China has built up.
I suspect China will muddle along and build up domestic competitors. Much of the chip industry is entering a bear market with oversupply and weak demand. With China out of the game, it will be Deep Freeze for most of these firms. Almost every day you hear horror stories of CapEx being slashed 60-80%. I don't think the pol sci/lawyer class that runs the bureaucracy has understood this fully, if at all.
Chip industry doesn’t rely on China. At all. Chinas chip industry is all low tier chips used for things like alarm clocks. Hardly a doomsday scenario for the economy
Speaking as someone in the chip industry, we most certainly do rely on China.
The Chinese market is massive, and was, until recently, growing at an eye-watering pace. I know of a few companies that took 20%+ off the balance sheets permanently when the Huawei sanctions hit a few years back. Even if the latest sanctions target advanced capabilities and leading-edge chips, these are still the centerpieces of designs with millions of units of volume (particularly in telecom, for 5G deployment and Chinese Android phones sold across the world), and less-advanced companies had many roles in these systems which are now jeopardized. Chinese electronics and electronics-adjacent industries, even those not relying on advanced chips or tools, are no doubt eyeing the latest round of sanctions with concern that their niche will be next. Semiconductor sales volume to China is going to slow down a lot for the next year or two, which is going to do damage to companies whose growth strategy was dependent on the continued growth of that market.
I'm less knowledgeable about the specifics on this part, but I also recall as little as a few years ago that the semiconductor packaging expertise cultivated in China is unrivaled, particularly its ability to scale. The more advanced devices nowadays bond the die to a PCB-like substrate material with extremely fine pitch routing on many layers of high-density film, to
famousfanout the contact points on the die to reasonable pitch and to improve signal/power integrity. While in theory the manufacture of the substrate and the bonding of the die can be done anywhere, China offered an unrivaled combination of rapid turnaround, high volume, and excellent quality (provided you knew where to look). There's a lot more packaging techniques developed and scaled in China, I just picked this as an example I remember; with chiplet designs for processors and chip-stacking technologies for flash memory, packaging is getting more demanding by the day. There's no explicit sanctions on this packaging equipment as far as I can tell - packaging is something the fab can contract out to a third party, and I suspect the sanctions are targeted narrowly on fab companies. Will large US semiconductor companies still need to process their finished dice in China, presenting additional risks for export control? Will the US summon up another round of sanctions to decapitate the packaging industry as well? Perhaps the industry has quietly de-risked itself over the last few years, but I can't find evidence of this with trivial googling.Anyway... we do rely on China, quite a lot, for both market size and post-fab manufacturing. Sanctions aren't doomsday, but definitely more than a haircut.
And that's before considering the possibility of TSMC catching some "errant" missiles in a hypothetical conflict (much less hypothetical than two weeks ago, to boot), knocking over more than half of worldwide advanced semiconductor production.
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