[Financial News] Attention is focused on whether the United States will tighten semiconductor export restrictions on China following the departure of Jensen Huang, former CEO of NVIDIA. Chinese experts predicted that China could also tighten controls on rare-earth exports if the United States imposes stronger restrictions on advanced chip exports.
According to the South China Morning Post (SCMP) in Hong Kong on the 13th (local time), Victor Gao, deputy director of the China Center for Globalization (CCG), said, “It would be a misjudgment for the United States to use the NVIDIA episode as an opportunity to pressure China.” He said China could respond to tighter U.S. restrictions by expanding limits on rare-earth exports.
Wang Yingliang, editor of the economic analysis platform Sharp Voice, said the former CEO Huang’s extramarital relationship had grown into a national security issue, giving the United States grounds to tighten semiconductor restrictions on China. He said China could impose sanctions on U.S. companies or use trade negotiations and cooperation on rare earths, drugs and telecommunications fraud as leverage to press the United States to ease its semiconductor restrictions.
“Even if China tightens semiconductor restrictions, the impact will be short-lived”
Editor Wang assessed that China’s substantial stockpile of semiconductors and growing technological capabilities could soften the short-term impact even if restrictions were tightened. He also expected the effect of the semiconductor issue on overall trade negotiations between the two countries to be limited.
Although uncertainties remain surrounding Alice Huang, identified as the former CEO’s extramarital partner, including allegations that she was a Chinese spy and an investigation, it was thought that U.S. President Donald Trump would maintain the current export-control policy unless security concerns grew further.
Xu Tianchen of the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) said the Democrats’ major victory in the U.S. midterm elections had weakened President Trump’s political standing. Xu assessed that U.S.-China relations had become even more fragile, since the two countries’ previously agreed “constructive strategic stability” was based on an agreement between President Trump and China.
President Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping are scheduled to hold their third summit this year on the occasion of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, China. Since the Trump administration took office, U.S. semiconductor export restrictions and China’s rare-earth export controls have served as key bargaining tools for the two countries. Through negotiations, both sides have maintained a truce in their trade conflict.
China’s state-run Global Times reported that global semiconductor competition could intensify following the former CEO Huang’s resignation, while new business opportunities could also increase. Liu Xiaoshan, head of the Embodied Intelligence Center at the Shenzhen Institute of AI and Robotics, predicted that major companies would accelerate the development of their own chips and diversify their computing architectures. He said that in the future, competition would be shaped not only by computing performance but also by computing architecture, software ecosystems and application costs. He also cited Huang’s development of graphics processing units (GPUs) and his creation of an AI computing ecosystem through the CUDA platform as contributions.[email protected] Lee Jeong-hwa Reporter
