Huawei obtained hundreds of thousands of chips from TSMC sparking concern for Trump nominee
Most PhoneArena readers know that a change to U.S. export rules made in 2020 prevents chip foundries that use American technology to produce chips from shipping cutting-edge silicon to Huawei. On Thursday, news reports indicated that hundreds of thousands of chips manufactured by TSMC were obtained by Huawei raising the red "alarm" flag for Jeffrey Kessler. The latter is President Donald Trump's nominee to be the Commerce Department's under secretary of commerce for industry and security.
Kessler was asked about the illegal shipments of chips before the Senate Banking Committee at his nomination hearing and said, "This is obviously a huge concern. It's critical to ensure that we have strong enforcement." If he is approved for the position, he will oversee the Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) and says that it should use "the full scope of enforcement and penalty authorities that it has."
While the U.S. has global leadership when it comes to designing AI chips, it isn't clear whether China is far behind the U.S. or is nipping at its heels. Artificial Intelligence is the current big tech battleground and the potential capabilities of AI for military use have both the U.S. and China working to develop powerful tools that require powerful silicon components.
You might recall that last October, a Canadian tech research company called TechInsights tore down a Huawei Ascend 910B AI accelerator chip. This component is used to speed up AI tasks including machine learning and deep learning. Traditional CPUs are usually not up for these tasks. The Ascend 910B is considered to be the most advanced AI accelerator mass-produced by a Chinese company. China's top foundry, SMIC, also the third largest foundry globally, reportedly produced the chip using its 7nm N+1 node.
"AI accelerators, like the one that these chips fueled, are at the forefront of our technology race with the CCP, and I fear the damage done here will have significant consequences for our national security"-John Moolenaar, chair of the House Committee on the Chinese Communist Party
Back in October when TechInsights discovered the TSMC chip in the Ascend 910B, Republican lawmaker John Moolenaar, the chair of the House Committee on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), called the TSMC-manufactured chips in Huawei’s AI accelerators a "catastrophic failure of export control policy."
When the Ascend 910B was opened by TechInsights, it found a TSMC chip inside it which violated U.S. export rules. TSMC discovered that the chip found in the Ascend 910B matched one that was produced by the foundry for Chinese chip designer Sophgo. The U.S. Commerce Department reacted by ordering TSMC to stop sending more chips to Chinese companies. Sophgo reportedly ordered hundreds of thousands of chips from TSMC.
The Taiwan-based foundry, the largest in the world, said in a statement earlier this week that it is "a law-abiding company" and had not shipped chips to Huawei since 2020. Perhaps that statement should include the word "directly" At one time, Huawei was TSMC's second-largest customer after Apple.
Huawei says that the Ascend 910B tops NVIDIA's A100 AI GPU by up to 20% in training performance.
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