2023-10-18 09:00:06
Ceveryone has their own irritants. The French have declared war on bedbugs; the Americans, to Chinese electronic chips. In both cases, the struggle promises to be long and not very fruitful. This does not prevent Washington from tightening the screw further by preparing new restrictions on exports of the most sophisticated chips to China. At the White House, we did not appreciate the fanfare presentation of Huawei’s latest smartphone.
The Shenzhen company, the bête noire of the American administration, presented in September a new 5G smartphone equipped with a Chinese chip whose engraving fineness, an indicator of its power, does not exceed 7 nanometers. A feat achieved by the Shanghai company SMIC, the country’s leading electronics manufacturer, of which the United States did not think it was capable. Suddenly, it becomes the rival of Intel, Samsung or TSMC in high-end chips.
Fight back, we have to tighten the meshes of the net once more. And the victim, this time, is the king of chips intended… for video games. The Californian company Nvidia, well known to gamers for its graphics cards, became the star of the sector, and of the stock market, when it was realized that its microprocessors were particularly suited to the powerful calculations required by artificial intelligence.
Foreign investment in China at an all-time low
To escape the American bans, the company had designed a special chip intended for the Chinese market, close to its flagship product but with capabilities limited enough to pass below the ban threshold. It’s now over, and it’s very bad news for Nvidia, which, like many American electronics manufacturers, generates nearly a quarter of its sales in the Middle Kingdom.
Behind this nanometer war lies the acceleration of the decoupling between the American and Chinese economies. Against their will, Western industries are folding the canvas. According to the Bloomberg agency, foreign investments in China amounted to 4.5 billion dollars (4.26 billion euros) in the second quarter, the lowest figure in twenty-five years. And too bad for Apple, Nvidia and the others, the first losers in the chip war.
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