from Hacker News

US revokes Intel, Qualcomm licenses to sell chips to Huawei

by xgdgsc on 5/8/24, 1:55 AM with 143 comments

  • by merricksb on 5/8/24, 6:44 AM

  • by luyu_wu on 5/8/24, 5:12 AM

    Completely do not understand this play. We make money from selling consumer chips to China, possibly put backdoors in their laptops, and now we want to remove that? Makes 0 sense from an economic AND national security standpoint considering these are laptop chips the US is banning.

    Huawei is already banned from selling, why would they kick the dead horse so to say.

    If anyone has any ideas, genuinely please let me know! I'm curious.

  • by snvzz on 5/8/24, 7:28 AM

    Dumb near-sighted move.

    Short term, it's a minor annoyance for China.

    Yet the primary effect it will have is for China to become less dependent on foreign chips faster.

  • by throwaway4good on 5/8/24, 5:20 AM

    I know Huawei is bad but what’s the logic here?

    The US kills off Huawei’s access to Google Android and TSMC. Almost completely killing their consumer business.

    But then hands them a lifeline: you can buy chips at Qualcomm (but not Mediatek) and Intel (but not AMD). Allowing them to maintain a presence in consumer phones and laptops.

    Now 5 years later when they have finally built their own operating system and setup their own fabs - the US kills access to Intel and Qualcomm.

    Why?

  • by DeathArrow on 5/8/24, 8:31 AM

    I expect US hardware companies shares to start falling in about 10 years. I don't think it will take China more than that to reach parity on semiconductor manufacturing.

    After that we will see a flood of lower cost hardware coming to the rest of the world, CPUs, GPUs, AI chips. That will put pressure on Intel, Qualcomm, Nvidia and the likes.

    I'd invest in US tech companies for the next few years and after that move to Asian companies.

  • by jambutters on 5/8/24, 5:05 AM

    Yikes, I want more competition as a consumer not less. I hope they will produce good chips of their own then. Nuts how this just keeps blowing up after trump started it

  • by wumeow on 5/8/24, 2:46 PM

    > Qualcomm recently said that its business with Huawei is already limited and will soon shrink to nothing. It has been allowed to supply the Chinese company with chips that provide older 4G network connections. It’s prohibited from selling ones that allow 5G access.

    > Huawei doesn’t rank in Qualcomm’s list of top 10 customers, according to Bloomberg supply chain analysis. It also doesn’t feature in Intel’s list of top customers.

  • by PeterStuer on 5/8/24, 2:02 PM

    Honest curiosity: who benefits in a US-China tradewar? (I don't mean US or China, but actors within those regions)

  • by pjmlp on 5/8/24, 5:18 AM

    Yet another step to end globalisation, and make each country slowly look for alternatives.

    This is how Year of Desktop Linux will finally happen, eventually forks will be required to work around export restrictions of the two US OS vendors, running on top of ARM and RISC-V units produced by non-US companies.

  • by ChrisArchitect on 5/8/24, 5:28 AM

  • by ein0p on 5/8/24, 5:29 AM

    That’s just dumb though. Huawei will just make its own chips, and five years from now when this bullshit is over those chips will absolutely eviscerate the US companies. That’s sort of like a drug dealer withholding drugs from a chemist.

  • by simonblack on 5/8/24, 3:43 AM

    Foot, meet bullet.

    The US semiconductor companies need Huawei more than Huawei needs the US semi companies.

    Say goodbye to those companies while you can. They won't be with us for very much longer. You don't last very long when you can't sell to the World's biggest market.