Mystery surrounds discovery of TSMC Tech inside Huawei AI chips
Live MintSome of the world’s most-guarded semiconductor technology has ended up in China’s Huawei Technologies’ new artificial-intelligence chips, showing the limits of the U.S.’s broad attempts to thwart such hardware linkups. Core circuitry produced by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. was found in Huawei’s Ascend 910B chips, according to people familiar with the matter and TechInsights, a Canada-based research firm that conducts product teardowns which have hit Washington’s radar before. A less-likely scenario discussed internally involves the TSMC circuitry—or “die" in chip-industry parlance—having been culled from a Huawei stockpile amassed before the U.S. sanctions hit more than four years ago, the people said. Two TechInsights reports, published last month, established a link between TSMC’s circuitry and the Huawei AI chip. Echoing the report’s findings, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said the U.S. export controls had succeeded at limiting the Huawei chip’s performance, making it “not nearly as good" as cutting-edge alternatives.