Winners or losers in China-US tech war?

Huawei, China's electronics giant, went from being the world's second-largest smartphone maker to "essentially dead," stated the BBC, quoting a Chinese policy research analyst in January this year.

- SAYEED AHMED

Just seven months later, in August, the company released its Mate 60 Pro flagship phone, which is powered by the 7-nanometre Kirin 9000S chip manufactured by China's Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC). Before this, the most advanced chip SMIC was known to be capable of making had a 14-nanometre design. It was a stunning show of defiance of the Washington-led sanctions against Beijing.

To put the nanometre metric in perspective, a strand of human hair is about 50,000 to 100,000 nanometres wide. And the most advanced chip makers, such as Taiwan's TSMC, can make 2-nanometre chips. The thinner the chip, the faster it is. These advanced chips run sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms in cutting-edge products such as fighter jets, missiles, satellites, and supercomputers.

One crucial aim of the Washington-led tech war is preventing Beijing from making advanced chips by blocking technology from the West, for instance, the Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machine from the Netherlands' ASML. But as SMIC moved to the 7-nanometre domain, sanctions don't seem to be working.