The Sunday Read: ‘The Silicon Blockade’

The Daily

The New York Times

Daily News, News

4.4 • 102.8K Ratings

🗓️ 13 August 2023

⏱️ 34 minutes

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Summary

Last October, the United States Bureau of Industry and Security issued a document that, underneath its 139 pages of dense bureaucratic jargon and minute technical detail, amounted to a declaration of economic war on China. The magnitude of the act was made all the more remarkable by the relative obscurity of its source. In recent years, semiconductor chips have become central to the bureau’s work. Despite the immense intricacy of their design, semiconductors are, in a sense, quite simple: tiny pieces of silicon carved with arrays of circuits. The chips are the lifeblood of the modern economy and the brains of every electronic device and system, including iPhones, toasters, data centers and credit cards. A new car might have more than a thousand chips, each one managing a different facet of the vehicle’s operation. Semiconductors are also the driving force behind the innovations poised to revolutionize life over the next century, like quantum computing and artificial intelligence. OpenAI’s ChatGPT, for example, was reportedly trained on 10,000 of the most advanced chips available. Though delivered in the unassuming form of updated export rules, the Oct. 7 controls essentially seek to eradicate, root and branch, China’s entire ecosystem of advanced technology. If the controls succeed, they could handicap China for a generation; if they fail, they may backfire spectacularly, hastening the very future the United States is trying desperately to avoid.

Transcript

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0:00.0	My name is Alex W. Palmer, I'm a contributing writer for the New York Times magazine.
0:18.9	This week's Sunday read is an article I wrote for the magazine about advanced semiconductor
0:24.0	chips, and about how American export controls over these chips are reshaping US China relations,
0:33.0	in ways we really haven't seen between two superpowers since the end of the Cold War.
0:41.1	October 7, 2022 was a Friday, and unbeknownst to most, it was a historic turning point.
0:51.5	On that day, the US officially announced export controls to prevent China from getting
0:57.1	a hold of the most advanced semiconductor chips.
1:02.3	This order came in the form of an SOTERIC 139 page document out of a tiny office within
1:10.4	the US Department of Commerce called the Bureau of Industry and Security, or BIS for short.
1:19.1	The reason for these controls, according to BIS, was to put a stop to China's military
1:25.0	modernization and human rights abuses.
1:28.7	BIS is so small that its budget amounts to what is basically a rounding error for the
1:35.6	Pentagon, about one-eighth the cost of a single patriot missile battery.
1:42.2	And so it's remarkable that this office is responsible for overseeing theoretically
1:49.1	every economic interaction involving US economy here or abroad, and that it essentially
1:56.0	established a non-proliferation regime for chips.
2:02.2	So nearly every electronic device runs on some kind of chip.
2:08.1	And to put it simply, a chip is just a piece of silicon with transistors on it.
2:14.2	The main chip on your iPhone could have 20 billion transistors, and they're each the
2:19.2	size of a virus.
2:22.0	But these aren't the chips that the US is so concerned about China obtaining.
2:26.6	Instead, it's the cutting-edge chips that are used to run supercomputers, power artificial
	...

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