Sanctions on China: America's AI Own Goal

Did the US sanctions hold China back, or did they make Huawei strong? In 2019 the US put Huawei on a blacklist, and in 2022 it restricted exports of chips and chipmaking machines. This video shows how Huawei and SMIC work around the restrictions, where the limits are (heat, memory, and a gap that Epoch AI estimates at three to four years) and what it means for Europe: Zeiss, Trumpf, ASML and Taiwan. 0:00 May 2019: Huawei lands on the blacklist 0:34 October 2022: export controls and the ASML EUV machine 1:15 SMIC and multiple patterning 2:24 Huawei's Tau scaling: stacking layers 3:32 What the numbers really say 4:12 Heat, yield, design software 4:48 The spare tires and their customers 5:48 No clear win: the gap in chips, volume and memory 6:49 Europe at the chokepoint 7:16 Takeaway Sources (selection): US export restrictions, October 2022: SiliconANGLE, Jun 29, 2023: https://siliconangle.com/2023/06/29/u... EUV never shipped to China: TechInsights, "China's SMIC Plays 7 nm Card": https://techinsights.com/ko/node/53522 ; EDN Asia: https://www.ednasia.com/?p=23565 DUV license requirement from Sep 1, 2023: CNBC, Jan 2, 2024: https://www.cnbc.com/2024/01/02/asml-... SMIC premium over TSMC: Asia Times, Feb 2024 (citing the Financial Times): https://asiatimes.com/2024/02/smic-to... Density, volume, HBM, gap: Epoch AI, "Will Huawei catch up to Nvidia by 2030?" (Sep 4, 2026): https://epoch.ai/publications/huaweis... Talk on May 25, 2026, Tau scaling, Logic Folding: The Next Web: https://thenextweb.com/news/huawei-ta... ; Fortune/Bloomberg: https://fortune.com/2026/05/25/huawei... Kirin measurements and heat: TrendForce, Sep 7, 2026: https://www.trendforce.com/news/2026/... First mass-produced Logic Folding chip: Caixin, Sep 8, 2026: https://www.caixinglobal.com/2026-09-... 2019 blacklist and the letter: Wikipedia, "HiSilicon": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiSilicon DeepSeek V4 for Ascend, market share (Bernstein), Huang interview: AP via Tech Xplore, Jun 29, 2026: https://techxplore.com/news/2026-06-n... TSMC about 90 percent of the most advanced chips: Foreign Policy, Jun 14, 2023: https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/06/14/... Note: many figures on Huawei's chips are the company's own claims and have not been independently verified. The market shares for this year (Nvidia about 8 percent, Huawei about 50 percent) are a forecast by the bank Bernstein, not a count. Image credits: Video footage from Pexels and Mixkit (free licenses, no attribution required). Photos from Wikimedia Commons: Silicon wafer researcher: U.S. Department of Energy, public domain: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi... Silicon Wafer (2020): Rob Bulmahn, CC BY 2.0: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi... Silicon Wafer (2012): Rob Bulmahn, CC BY 2.0: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi... TSMC factory, Hsinchu: Arusanov, public domain: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi... AI voices notice: the narrator (James) and the quote voices for He Tingbo (Matilda) and Jensen Huang (Bill) are AI voices from ElevenLabs, not voice clones. #AI #Huawei #Chips