Huawei chairman thanks the US for export restrictions on chips, says it supercharged China’s semiconductor industry — Washington’s export controls encouraged Chinese firms to invest in R&D and build their own tech stack competing with American tech - Tom's Hardware

Huawei's rotating chairman Xu Zhijun expressed gratitude toward the U.S. for imposing export restrictions on Chinese tech firms, arguing that such pressure accelerated the development of China's semic... Read original →

U.S. chip export controls have catalyzed, not crippled, China’s semiconductor ecosystem—triggering a vertical stack rebuild. With A100/H100 bans, Huawei Ascend and Cambricon are fast-tracking CUDA alternatives via CANN and MLU software stacks. SMIC, though blocked from EUV, leverages DTCO innovations like LogicFolding to approach 3nm-equivalent nodes. Compliance costs now force OEMs to allocate over 20% of budgets to domestic validation, prioritizing supply chain sovereignty over cost. NVIDIA rushes H200-compliant variants while AMD bets on MI300X China SKUs—but with U.S. AI chip share collapsing from 95% to zero, Chinese firms pivot to algorithmic efficiency, forging a 'weak hardware, strong models' paradigm. Within 18 months, breakthroughs in chiplet integration and near-memory computing will enable asymmetric competition. The global semiconductor order is bifurcating: one track anchored in U.S. IP and Taiwan, China fabs; the other rooted in Chinese standards and mainland capacity.