Semiconductors will remain central to America’s tech rivalry with China

As soon asGSSMICBy Don Weinland the Huawei Mate 60 Pro handset went on sale on August 29th, technologists raced to smash it open and see how it worked. The Chinese telecoms-equipment maker had somehow succeeded in creating a new 5 smartphone—something few thought it could accomplish. Huawei had been forced to give up making such devices in 2020 after American sanctions blocked it from buying advanced semiconductors or the equipment needed to make them. Sales of Huawei smartphones, which at one stage even outsold Apple’s iPhones globally, collapsed. Yet as they sifted through the innards of the Mate 60 Pro, engineers discovered a Chinese-made chip that seemed to show that American sanctions had been overcome by indigenous innovation.This chip, the Kirin 9000, was manufactured by , the leading Chinese chipmaker, and its appearance was a deeply symbolic moment. China’s tech war with America began in earnest in 2019 when Donald Trump’s administration banned the sale of high-end chips to Huawei. In 2022 President Joe Biden built on the framework of those sanctions to introduce a blanket ban on the sales of advanced semiconductors to all companies in China. Since then leaders in Beijing have retaliated by banning the sales of some chips made by Micron, an American firm, to Chinese companies, on security grounds. They also began restricting exports of gallium and germanium, two rare metals needed to make state-of-the-art chips.