Size isn’t everything: China’s new chip is less earthshaking than you may have heard
It’s one thing to make circuits smaller than the US will sell you; it’s another to do it at scale.
When Huawei released its new Mate 60 Pro phone earlier this year, it set off alarm bells in Western media, which fixated on the ultra-tiny 7-nanometer circuits in the phone’s Chinese-made chipset. Just a year earlier, the U.S. had imposed export controls meant to keep China from obtaining circuits of 16 nanometers or smaller. The announcement seemed to demonstrate not just China’s technical prowess but also the failure of a signature element of Western technology policy in its competition with China, that has become all the more timely with new Biden administration new chip controls and AI policy efforts, seeking to block American chipmakers from selling semiconductors to China that circumvent government restrictions.