Wait: an economy under partial trade interdiction is bootstrapping its own domestic chip fab, and this is (a) "secret" and (b) "skirting sanctions"<p>If you exclude a former trade partner from access to technology having sited factories onshore which made gen #-1 capable parts, exactly how surprising is it that they attempt to bootstrap gen #1 and gen #+1 and onward?<p>What did anyone think would happen?<p>I guess I'm just complaining (shouting at the moon) about language. The report here should be factual: are they actually going to succeed, and how different is their state support to e.g. the billions of dollars pumped into TSMC to bring them onshore in the USA.
Hardly a secret.<p>China is building a complete computing supply chain. From mining, semiconductor fabs to operating systems, AI platforms ... the works.<p>Huawei is a key part of that. For two obvious reasons. It is a massive elite engineering company. And it was one of the first major companies to be hit by US sanctions.<p>How are they doing? Hard to tell. But the mentioned plants are not new; they were announced back when Trump first hit Huawei with major sanctions.<p>There are a lot of rumours, for Huawei, in particular about an upcoming 5G phone. If they turn out to be true, it would mean that the Chinese would have broken the US monopoly on 5G radio chips for phones (which would be a significant breakthrough - one of many needed).