The 5G race between US and China is now a full-on battle
The crackdown on Huawei by the Trump administration is a full-on assault, leveraging the weight of an entire country to destroy one company.
WHILE the current pandemic exposes the importance of international cooperation, the crackdown on Huawei by the Trump administration has taken on an ominous tone. Senior officials in the White House have drawn up new rules that would require companies to obtain a licence if they use American equipment to make components sold to Huawei. This is a policy that targets Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), which manufactures Huawei's chipsets, including those for usage in China.
TSMC is the world's largest dedicated semiconductor foundry. Since its factories at the Taiwan headquarters, as well as those around the world, use machines supplied by US vendors such as Applied Materials, the new rules will bar TSMC from serving Huawei. That should stunt Huawei's ability to pursue a 5G strategy and, by definition, thwart Xi Jinping's ambitions of both rolling out 5G inside China, as well as exporting Chinese technologies abroad.
Never before has the United States revised its regulatory regime to target a specific firm so completely. Such a crackdown is a far cry from barring imports for national security or seeking legal redress for infringements of one's intellectual property. Rather, it is a full-on assault, leveraging the weight of an entire country to destroy one company.
