Chinese Chip Makers are Trying to Circumvent US Sanctions by Slowing Down Chip Performance

In what can only be called an unusual move, several Chinese fabless chip makers—such as Alibaba and Biren Technology—who manufacturers at TSMC, are looking at running their chips slower. The reason for this is that they’re trying to circumvent the US sanctions against Chinese chip makers. It should be noted that these are chips that have already taped out and gone into sample production, such as Biren’s BR100 GPU.As reported earlier today, Alibaba even had one of its chips delisted from the official SPEC ranking, due to being unavailable and it’s possible that it’s one of the chips that’s affected by the US sanctions.

Considering that the Chinese chip makers are dependent on the same cutting edge nodes at TSMC as the likes of Nvidia, AMD, Qualcomm etc. it would potentially lead to more capacity for these companies at TSMC. According to the report by the Financial Times, Biren has had to stop shipments of its GPUs, as the company is going to have to prove that its chips don’t violate the US export control restrictions. Apparently the rules to work out if a chip falls under the US sanctions or not are anything but clear. One metric is apparently based on the bidirectional transfer rate, which is capped at below 600 GB/s between chips, but the tricky part is that this metric can be calculated in several different ways. As such, Biren has dropped the transfer rate from 640 to 576 GB/s according to the Financial Times. The sanctions are likely to cause longer term concerns for TSMC as well, as the company is likely to lose several big customers for its cutting edge nodes, at least for the time being.