Years after Uncle Sam ordered US telecommunications providers to rip and replace Huawei kit from their networks, Beijing is telling telcos in China to strip out American-made chips.
On Friday, Chinese officials reportedly ordered its top telecoms players to eliminate foreign semiconductors — primarily those from Intel and AMD — within the next three years.
At issue were concerns that, due to Chinese laws mandating the sharing of info with Beijing, Huawei and ZTE could be forced to place backdoors in its equipment to facilitate intelligence gathering operations.
However, it’s not clear at this point what, if any, support will be provided to its telcos to offset the cost of replacing foreign chips with homegrown silicon.
China’s shift from Western tech has intensified in response to American trade restrictions designed to deny the Middle Kingdom access to leading-edge processor technologies required for AI, as well as the chipmaking equipment necessary to achieve self sufficiency in the near term.
Despite these efforts, Chinese companies, including Huawei and Semiconductor Manufacturing International Co (aka SMIC) have been remarkably successful at building relatively high-end silicon.
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