Taiwan Imposes Stricter Chip Export Rules on Chinese Tech Giants

It is now becoming even more difficult for Chinese companies to obtain chips from Taiwan. This is an immediate consequence of scams that tried to undermine the sanctions against the Beijing regime.

Sharper export controls

With Huawei and Smic, Taiwan has placed two of the leading Chinese technology groups on his list of strategic high technology companies, to which exports are subject to approval in the future. This decision represents a further setback for China’s efforts to achieve technological independence, reports the US news agency Bloomberg. The measure was announced by the Taiwanese Ministry of Economic Affairs and follows a number of international sanctions, especially by the United States.

Huawei and Smic have been in the focus of Western export controls for a long time, as fears that highly developed technology that is sold to these companies could also be used militarily. The new step of Taiwans is part of these efforts to better secure critical supply chains.

In the future, Huawei and Smic will need special export licenses to obtain products from Taiwanian manufacturers. In addition to the world’s leading chip manufacturer TSMC, this also affects other industry sizes such as UMC, ASE, Spil and Nanya. This could make central delivery flows to China’s semiconductor industry.

Blacklist

The trigger of the current tightening was a scandal for the illegal delivery Huawei from TSMC. Huawei had reportedly tried to obtain around two million advanced chip components for his Ascend 910 processors-despite existing US sanctions.

This incident had attracted international attention and further fueled the debate about sharper controls. Huawei and Smic symbolically near Extremist groups such as the Taliban or Al-Qaida. Reactions from China initially failed to materialize, and the Taiwanese Ministry of Economic Affairs has not yet commented on the background.