The purpose of the chip ban imposed by the United States and restricting the shipment of high-end chips and advanced semiconductor equipment is to hinder our high-tech development. But paradoxically, it has deceived many American companies because they rely on these for high profits.
Although the United States has a lot of technological leadership in semiconductors, American companies are inseparable from the mainland, the world's largest semiconductor market. At first, when the United States first implemented the controls, many American companies responded one after another, but now they have collectively changed their faces!
In the past few years, the world was in a period of core shortage, chips from suppliers such as Qualcomm and Nvidia were in short supply, and the production capacity of wafer factories such as TSMC and Samsung had been full.
At that time, the United States began to implement chip restrictions, and the corresponding manufacturers listened one after another, not only American companies, but also foreign companies using American technology.
For example, TSMC had to stop making chips for Huawei, its second largest customer, but now they are losing more and more.
Later, the global shortage of cores suddenly turned into a surplus, and semiconductor companies had a hard time. Chips can't be sold, there is a surplus of inventory, and Qualcomm, MediaTek, etc. can only cut chip orders, which directly leads to a rapid decline in TSMC's production capacity.
However, TSMC's performance pressure has increased, and it can only slow down the expansion of production across the board, so it postponed the delivery of ASML's EUV equipment.
At this time, the United States continued to expand chip restrictions, and the reaction of American companies began, and even the CEOs of Intel, Qualcomm, and Nvidia, the three major chip giants, collectively said to the lobby, hoping that the Biden administration would not blindly expand chip restrictions.
They are very dependent on the mainland market, mobile phone SoC giant Qualcomm about 67% of the revenue comes from the mainland market, CPU giant Intel mainland market revenue is close to 20 billion US dollars, GPU giant Nvidia mainland market revenue accounts for about 20%.
The U.S. side says that it will consider the interests of its enterprises, but in fact it is constantly increasing restrictions, so enterprises can only save themselves.
In the face of the huge demand in the mainland market, American companies naturally did not want to give up, so they started to act from their own perspectives, which is equivalent to the collective "change of face" of American companies, which directly hit the soft underbelly of the United States and made the chip ban almost meaningless.
Some time ago, we held a high-level enterprise development forum, which was actively attended by chip giants such as Qualcomm, Intel, and Micron, as well as technology giants such as Apple, Synopsys, and SK hynix.
Among them, Apple CEO Cook has attracted a lot of attention, and is the most frequent high-level in China, visiting China for the third time in the past six months, and also coming to China in advance, first participating in the opening of the Shanghai Jing'an store, and meeting with BYD and other supply chain leaders.
The point is that Cook said that he loves China and the Chinese, and that he attaches importance to the mainland market and will continue to increase investment in the future.
There is also Micron, which has been doing the business of "eating and smashing pots" before, not only closing the Shanghai R&D center and wanting to move all the talents, but also lobbiing the United States to suppress our storage industry, Fujian Jinhua, Yangtze River Storage, etc.
Finally, Micron was investigated by our relevant departments, and as a result, it was restricted from purchasing important departments, and Micron suffered huge losses.
In order to recover the loss, Micron not only spent 4.3 billion yuan to expand the Xi'an factory, but the CEO also visited China twice to communicate. This time in China, the CEO of Micron directly said that he plans to continue to expand investment in China to meet the needs of customers in the mainland market.
Not only Micron, but also Qualcomm and Intel have also said that they will expand their investment in the mainland market. Qualcomm and Intel have long applied for 4G and other shipping licenses, and it has recently been rumored that Intel's license has been extended, which shows that there is hard work behind it.
In addition, Nvidia and AMD, after the shipment of high-end AI chips was restricted, they quickly launched special chip chips for the mainland.
There are also U.S. semiconductor equipment companies also trying to ship to Chinese companies, among which the equipment giant Applied Materials, even through the South Korean subsidiary turnover, shipped a lot of semiconductor equipment to the mainland market, so it also received multiple summons from the United States.
The main reason why American companies operate in this way is that the mainland market is large enough and there is no substitute for it in the world. More importantly, we provide an open and stable business environment, and do not arbitrarily target Chinese companies like the US.
In this regard, the German media "Munich Mercury" said that the US chip ban may have played some role, but it is more counterproductive.
The US ban does not care about the interests of enterprises at all, and enterprises can tolerate it in the short term, but after a long time, it will completely break out!