The US is really going after the Chinese semiconductor industry

The United States would directly slow down developments within China, but this may not be enough.

Next week, the United States would announce the new sanctions on China, which we have already discussed before. THE Bloomberg according to his recent report, the US restrictions are primarily aimed at slowing down the development of the Chinese semiconductor industry, including curbing the development of chip manufacturing equipment manufacturers operating in China, and limiting the delivery of production equipment.

Specifically, Chinese companies are targeted, not industry categories in general, and in the first round restrictions will be introduced against more than a hundred equipment manufacturers, including companies that receive frequent state subsidies. The entities involved are for China to replace the assets of major foreign suppliers where possible. From the latter point of view, it is worth thinking about the companies known as ASML, Applied Materials, KLA, Lam Research and Tokyo Electron.

In connection with the above, it is worth noting that Chinese equipment manufacturers are still far from the technological level of the West, and in fact, they are at least a decade away. But the great power of the East spends a lot of money in luring the Western specialists, thus ensuring that they can get access to various trade secrets and in this form they could catch up within two or three decades, which would allow their own larger companies to produce cutting-edge chips without restriction.

The best example for understanding the problem is perhaps the HBM memory standard, which is now also subject to export restrictions, but the Chinese CXMT has already reached the level of being able to independently produce HBM2 standard memories. With this, they are still very far from the Western standard, but the pace at which they are catching up is spectacular.

Bloomberg points out that the changes are not yet final, they may change until the official announcement. It seems that the USA is striving for a kind of balance between holding back Chinese development and the demands of Western companies. With this, the sanctions will not be very strict, but the targeted Chinese companies will still feel their impact.