Kind: captions
Language: en
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is China becoming the world leader in
technology the United States and China
are locked in a big Power struggle
Innovation creates Global power over the
last 40 years China has had an
unprecedented economic boom to
understand how China innovates is to
rethink what Innovation means in the
first place don't cut they became the
manufacturer of the world tinkering
innovating and even stealing the lead in
some
areas why was China successful with 5G
it got the message of what could 5G do
from healthare education
manufacturing with support from the
Chinese State huge corporations like
Huawei have spread their wings was their
successes particularly in 5G technology
that are really leading the way and are
causing us to have to play catchup to
them today a tech war between China and
the West is starting to heat
up what does it mean for China and the
rest of the world inside China's Tech
boom right now on Nova
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this is the big annual meeting for the
Builders of the global
internet tech companies from all over
the world have come here to Barcelona
Spain and the biggest delegation is from
the Chinese tech company Huawei
everybody in the world is talking about
5z in this room it feels like Huawei is
Top Dog they have the biggest Pavilion
and the most sales and patents in the
Next Generation internet Tech called
5G they are also just one of many
Chinese Tech Giants Taking Over Global
Industries solar power wind power
drones
batteries all Fields where Chinese
companies have taken the lead in
Innovation how is China doing it by
copying others or are they finding their
own Innovation Secret Sauce could they
even surpass the us as the world's
leading
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innovator these are questions that I've
discussed time and time again welcome to
the cynical podcast the weekly
discussion of current affairs in China
I'm Kaiser gu a journalist and podcaster
I live in the States but for 20 years I
lived in China I was comm's director at
one of their biggest Tech firms and
guitarist in China's first heavy metal
band Tong
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Dynasty oh hi hey how are you it's been
a while good to see you yeah looking
forward to this when I interview people
for my podcast I find no shortage of
different takes on the rise of Chinese
Tech the entire Chinese Tech landscape
and business landscape I think that's
actually getting stronger uh year on
year a major misunderstanding that
Americans might have about China is that
it is mostly focused on Lower value work
as well as copying but China has mostly
transcended that China is really the
only peer competitor of the US that has
companies competing across the
technology sector China is beating the
United States in Tech heavy Industries
it accounts for a third of global output
and knowledge intensive Industries
compared with the United States which
accounts for
20% today it might be surprising to
think of China as a technology
leader but for much of History China was
the world leader in science and
innovation in fact the shame of losing
this position and the the dream of
regaining it were major motivations for
the founders of the Chinese Communist
party it all started with a widespread
National
Awakening 3,000 students gather in front
of TN on men on for made shouting China
is for the Chinese people so to many
Chinese they saw Science and Technology
as uh a way of national Rejuvenation and
National
salvation uh and it became a
foundational principle of the modern
Chinese State advancing Science and
Technology truly became a national
Obsession in 1978 with the rise of the V
Chinese leader dung sha
ping a new beginning in us China
relations dung opened China to the world
so it could learn foreign technology his
Market reforms helped lift over 700
million people out of poverty that's
more than twice the population of the US
but this was only part of dung's plan
another goal was to reclaim China's
historical place as world leader in
science and technology within a
generation so more than four decades
later how is dung's plan
going to many Chinese there is no better
example of success than the tech giant
Huawei but it's also at the center of a
storm of accusations of intellectual ual
property theft and ties with the Chinese
government with all the controversy it's
really easy to overlook something this
company does innovate and it does it in
a very different way than we do in the
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west the first thing you notice when
stepping onto a Huawei campus is its
style Ren
architecture marble statues European
luxury it's all unmistakably Huawei but
despite the Disney Vibes it's the
perfect place to start exploring how
Chinese tech companies
innovate so this is our
library Paul scanland is huawei's Chief
technology officer he was drawn to China
from abroad to work in Tech in part
because he was impressed by huawei's
Massive investment in research and
development
why I love the company it's very simple
it's a platform that allows me to take a
lot of the ideas I have to the
world the platform is an R&D
platform we spend more than 22% of our
gross revenue on
R&D that makes Huawei one of the world's
largest corporate Spenders on research
and
development they've set more technical
standards than any any other
organization in the world for
5G 5G is an advanced wireless
communication technology because it
operates at higher frequencies than 4G
it can be up to 100 times faster and
also more
reliable it also hasn't really been
fully deployed yet but in the small town
of Jen we can start to see what it can
do with 4G our cell phone towers connect
mainly to our phones and there's a limit
to how many devices any one Tower can
handle at a
time 5G is dramatic Improvement that
promises to connect all sorts of devices
wirelessly to the internet and in much
greater
numbers in Wireless Communications data
is transmitted by radio
waves as you progress from 3G to 4G to
5G the frequency of the radio waves
becomes higher and
higher this allows more data to be
carried enabling faster download and
upload speeds this is a big deal because
so much of tech depends on internet
infrastructure as 3G progressed to 4G
increased data loads enabled simple
phone calls to progress to ride hailing
apps food delivery apps video
conferences the list is
endless increased data loads help build
the so-called called Internet of Things
allowing devices to talk to devices like
cars talking to cars or machines in a
factory coordinating to become fully
automated why was China success with 5G
it got the message of what could 5G do
it got the message that if I can provide
connectivity I can collect data
information based on information AI
algorithms can do things from Healthcare
educ
manufacturing okay across all of the
sectors it understood that urgently
Huawei is a genuinely impressive
state-of-the-art worldclass telecoms
equipment manufacturing company and it
was their successes particularly in 5G
technology that are really leading the
way um and are causing us to have to
play catchup to them
what's being installed right now is a
new 5G antenna it supports a very wide
range of frequencies including our 700
MHz
frequency China is deploying 5G at a
scale greater than any other place in
the world China is exceptionally good at
developing infrastructure uh whether
it's you know 5G infrastructure or
electric grid infrastructure or electric
vehicle charging infrastructure it has
this ability to do good planning and
then also to
execute authorities in China are pushing
5G hard turning difficult to connect
places like China's mountainous quo
province into Laboratories for huawei's
5G
applications out here in the mountains
the internet has always been poor a
little bit of bad weather a little bit
of wind no internet it was really hard
to get a signal
in remote places forget about
it but it has changed
recently now with 5G we've started doing
smart
farming 5G technology is able to make
stronger connections and transfer more
data to more points this enables places
like this tea Farm to deploy Wireless
sensors in hard-to-reach places
this Tea Plantation has really embraced
smart
farming it's been quite useful for our
agricultural
management these sensors all help us
predict the humidity wind conditions and
temperature more data leads to better
modeling and better crop yields
processing the information fed to it
through 5G a smart farming system can
alert Farmers to the optimal times to
remove weeds plant seeds and and harvest
crops but this is just the beginning of
what 5G can
do what I've seen in China is 5G
completely changing the way people live
and
work even in seemingly low Tech
traditional
Industries across the country more than
2 and A2 million people are employed in
coal mining it's dangerous work known
for frequent accidents and
fatalities this is the main shaft of the
mine it's a dark place with thick air
it's also the most dangerous place in
the mine one of the problems is the
inability to control Machinery
remotely it's impractical to connect
using wires meaning workers have needed
to be perilously close to their machines
at all
times 5G is capable of bringing digital
connections into deep underground
crevices such as this one allowing the
facility to become completely automated
previous 4G systems beamed data
inefficiently in all directions 5G is
much more precise we can make
beams
simultaneously that can be a little
sliver going this way or we can have a
little sliver that way or we can have
multiple ones that way or multiple ones
this way and it can extend the distance
or it can provide more capacity or it
can follow somebody or something
China says its goal is to ultimately
move away from coal and into cleaner
forms of
energy 5G is a critical part of this
plan as
well this is the ding dang floating
solar farm across a large swath of sea
are endless solar panels each requiring
monitoring the plant's expected total
output is 550 million kilowatt hours per
year that's enough to power 52 thousand
typical American Homes you have tens of
thousands of photovoltaic cells and 5G
can monitor information from them more
efficiently than anything else
can China's national 5G infrastructure
gives a built-in advantage to this large
scale solar
farm solar panel technology is prone to
malfunctions and one problematic panel
can shut down an entire
grid 5G enables each panel to constantly
send data to a Central Command station
making inspections more efficient and
saving labor
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costs and a solar farm can scale to a
size that wouldn't be possible
otherwise I can now monitor them to see
whether they're failing or when they're
going to fail so I can optimize that
prediction of maintenance for these
farms and there's another unexpected
benefit here the shade from the solar
farm actually cools the surrounding
water helping create an ideal
environment for farming shrimp and other
Seafood but all this is possible because
the Chinese government sees the
advantage of creating a web of
connectivity across the entire country
and is willing to use its Central
authority to make it a reality 5G
cellular technology is really sort of a
major leap and it really is more of the
high-tech future that we seen in the
movies and in sci-fi um in which we're
surrounded all the time uh by you know
really high-speed data and the ability
to exploit all of that and that just
basically means 5G will enable a much
more precision-based
applications driverless cars automated
ports and factories Next Generation AI
what all of these things have in common
is that they can't fully develop until
5G infrastructure is built bu and as
with most new infrastructure we don't
yet know how it will change society for
better or
worse why is it that a Chinese company
is leading the way in building the next
generation of the
internet there's no doubt that the
Chinese Communist Party uses its Central
authority to force change in ways that
aren't possible in Western democracies
but another key reason is the intense
work culture it can be brutal with 6-day
weeks and 12-hour days being the
norm despite it all when I worked in
Chinese Tech I still found something
energizing about
[Music]
it Junior Associates nuian and Lin are
currently taking part in huawei's brand
of basic training here all new employees
even office workers must learn the art
of deploying 5G base
stations they train for a variety of
terrain from Urban centers to the kind
of remote mountains that guo province is
known for and that Huawei specializes in
reaching
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[Laughter]
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for cut
the training we saw is hard to
describe Western observers often call
the Huawei Company culture
militaristic that's probably part of the
story but there's also something else
hwe tries to motivate its employees in
ways that probably would not fly in
Western
industry wangin leads the training for
new
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recruits you look
this is our training area I think it's
different than the training facilities
in most other
companies our facilities are Outdoors on
top of a
[Music]
mountain this slogan how would I
translate it for
foreigners if you want to take more
responsibilities you must work harder in
the training
I look at these slogans and think about
how out of place they would seem at a
western
company the messages are about enduring
hardships and winning
battles Huawei was founded by Ren who
started his career in the Chinese Army
he then went on to found Huawei whose
name literally means Chinese
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achievement what I find interesting
interesting is how the posters around
campus Echo the propaganda style of the
Chinese government they talk about the
importance of sacrifice and hard work in
aiding China's technological
development a lot of what Beijing tries
to do is it it's trying to use ideology
to Corral a lot of the dynamic firms um
and people in China to pursue the goals
that it really wants to
have my job is to train the young people
to develop the spirit of bitter struggle
to train everyone to become full with
Vigor only when you have suffered can
you understand the sweet things in life
people live good lives now they never
have experienced the struggle the point
of this place is to give them a taste of
that
the people here train to connect not
just China but every corner of the
world this is in line with Chinese State
goals which seek to export Chinese
technology globally
in countries in Africa you will mostly
see Chinese equipment everywhere I was
recently in Ethiopia and I was struck
because I kept having this outof body
experience I felt like I was in China
the subway was constructed by China the
subway cars have Chinese words in them
the United States is not visibly present
in a lot of developing countries around
the world by 2017 Huawei was bringing 5G
and its applications to the entire world
and then the US government started to
take
notice Huawei and ZTE are both stateb
companies their efforts to enter the
American Market is a great example of
how China attempts to steal our private
data and intellectual property in 2018
hwei CFO Mong wano the daughter of
founder nun was apprehended in Canada
under suspicion of violating us
sanctions the whole world sees this for
what it is America is trying to strangle
China's high-tech
companies in May 2019 the US government
placed Huawei on the so-called entity
list a register of companies that are
effectively banned from doing business
in the
US James molon is one of the architects
of this policy change the day that
Huawei and its subsidiaries were placed
on the entity list was frankly a day of
real sense of personal accomplishment
for me I had been writing about Huawei
for 25 years and informing the US
government about many different features
of huawei's relationship with the
Chinese military with the Chinese
government um its activities abroad that
I thought were suspicious and
questionable a country is always going
to be extremely protective of its
telecomunications infrastructure it is
the way it maintains control over its
territory and connects its leaders its
police forces its military and during
the Cold War was the way in which the
United States government maintained
command and control over weapons that
could have destroyed the world hundreds
of times over mulvenon contends that
while there hasn't been any proof
nothing in public at least of hua's
spying in the US there is no way of
ensuring a Chinese company's
independence from Bing to protect
against this threat the US government
has mandated Huawei equipment AC across
the country be ripped out and
replaced in the town of South Canon
Pennsylvania local Telecom Company CEO
Jim kale is overseeing the removal of
Huawei equipment from the internet
infrastructure but now he faces a new
problem alternate equipment is three
times more expensive than huawei's
without Huawei there is no
cost-effective way to connect this
region to the internet
our allegian is to our own country here
and that's very important I take that
very seriously and the rest of us as
rural Americans we're
patriotic and uh yeah so we we did think
long hard about that before we made that
decision had about 1,300 of these units
deployed in customers homes over the
course of the last couple years in
particular there was the the push to to
ban the product and um which eventually
led to the Mandate where we had to rip
and replace and uh we're now in the proc
process of doing that re taking swapping
out the Huawei solution with a with a
different solution and actually that
when you think about it it's actually a
windfall for China right so you're
actually taking equipment out there
you're ripping it out and you're going
out and buying new equipment
right buying it from China right I mean
know it's it's the vendors the vendors
we do business with they're getting
their parts from China and so China's
getting a windfall out of
this for many observers in America the
most challenging thing about Huawei is
that they can make products that no
Western firm has been able to replicate
especially when it comes to
cost and without Huawei there is simply
no costeffective way right now to build
5G across much of America something that
lawyer Eric Atria discovered when he and
his family moved to rural
Florida we moved out here and found out
that there literally wasn't internet out
here uh we couldn't get any internet and
the only place in our yard that we could
actually get one bar of service from our
cell phone provider is this log so my
wife called it logging on and you only
get one bar of signal standing
here so my wife was out here the other
day holding her phone in the air as a
personal Hotpot and her laptop in the
other hand so she could do a work
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meeting actually not working the United
States has only Built about 100,000 5G
base stations compared to the over 2
million in China
no it's
working why is China so much more
successful at creating affordable
cuttingedge
Tech so historically a country's
capacity to produce was itself viewed as
Innovative so in perial times China's
capacity to produce these you know
Wonderful Goods this porcelain the silk
was all inspiring for those who were
able to to view them to see them and
it's only closer to our present where we
see this distinction between Innovation
and production China is a place where
R&D and Manufacturing are very tightly
linked together where the knowledge can
really circulate um and be kept alive it
can be practiced and can be made better
and that is something where the US has
fallen behind pretty substantially over
the last five
decades shinin is the manufacturing
epicenter of China it's also the
hometown of most of the Chinese Tech
Giants including
huawe so Shenzhen was declared famously
by dong Xiao ping a special economic
zone in the
1980s before 1979 shenen was a small
fishing Village of 30,000 people then it
was designated China's first special
economic zone an experiment with
capitalism that set it apart from the
centrally planned economic model in the
rest of the country from the beginning
authorities viewed Mastery of
manufacturing as key to
Innovation Flash Forward to today
shinjin is the manufacturing Powerhouse
of the
world in 1997 there were many foreign
investors here it was the peak of the
reform and opening years lots of foreign
Capital was flowing into China and this
gave us lots of opportunities to learn
and improve ourselves a lot of people
from all over China from Europe from the
United States and from many other parts
of the world came to Shenzhen um to
implement technology production in new
ways to walk around Shenzhen is to see a
tech Hub which is very different from
Silicon Valley's software startup
culture at the center of it all are the
factories and the Art of making makers
spaces are everywhere where people
produce Tinker hack and most famously
copy foreign Tech a lot of developing
countries got to be richer by copying
and indeed stealing from Advanced
countries that was the case when the
United States was a major IP violator
back in the uh 19th century mostly from
um the United Kingdom Shang Jo is a
product designer in
shinen he challenges the whole idea of
what IP theft means
a lot of people talk about knockoff
products in China like all the fake
iPhones
made but I see knockoff as a neutral
word which means learning and
evolving something that's associated
with intellectual property with patents
arguably with a very Western Centric
definition of what counts as Innovation
which is often rooted in this idea of
that there's an authentic original
uh a charismatic technology Creator who
came up with this fantastic completely
novel idea that's revolutionizing a
whole industry and we don't really think
of something like modification or slow
paced change as Innovation and so what I
think is really important for us to
understand how China innovates is to
rethink what Innovation means in the
first
place there is a more important part of
technology which is something I call
Process knowledge which is simply the
experience the tacid knowledge the
understanding of how to make something
and so in the kitchen context if you put
someone into a super fancy kitchen
decked out with u really fancy gadgets
as well as extremely clear recipes uh I
think that person would have a hard time
doing something as simple as frying an
egg uh if he hasn't had some cooking
experience in the past the kitchen
analogy seems like a good one to me in
my years working in techken China I saw
it become the workshop of the world like
a nation of busy chefs China was making
things at turbo speed building
worldclass skills but then something
else started to happen they started
experimenting in the kitchen as there
was increasing clustering of
manufacturing centers around different
Industries a lot of learning occurred I
remember going through a factory in
China and one of the ways they had been
able to cut the cost of the solar panel
was to figure out a way to slice the
Ingot more thinly China is masterful at
these types of process Innovations and
over time also began to really gain
Innovation
capabilities the spaces where China has
World leading Tech tend to be the places
where China holds manufacturing
dominance Chinese battery companies make
77% of the world's batteries China's
firm produce 80% of the components in
solar panels Huawei followed a similar
path after producing Telecom equipment
for foreign companies for years their
manufacturing experience helped them
develop better and cheaper
products if China had never become the
workshop of the world I doubt we'd even
be talking about Chinese Tech Giants and
a lot of the manufacturing Workforce in
China has expanded very significantly in
part at the expense of the us as we see
from covid-19 a lot of the US
manufacturers in its early days struggle
to make something as simple as masks for
people as well as cotton swabs for
testing the contrast that we see in
China is that manufacturers were able to
respond really
quickly manufacturing dominance creates
spillover advantages for Chinese
entrepreneurs advantages that show up in
unexpected
places AR
in 2014 I built a 10 megawatt Bitcoin
mine in the inner Mongolia Province at
that time it was one of China's largest
facilities now in
2021 I'm building the same kind of
facility here in the
desert except this time around it's 60
times larger it's like coming full
circle just in a new
location Kevin pan is the the CEO of
pulin one of the largest Bitcoin mining
operations in the world a Bitcoin mining
facility is similar to a data center
powerful computers operate 24/7 to run
the Bitcoin Network for security the
network depends on the participation of
computers scattered around the world to
collectively keep track of Bitcoin
ownership the system issues Bitcoins to
participants by rewarding those who
solve complex cryptographic puzzles and
activity that requires huge amounts of
electricity Bitcoin mining was once
dominated by us miners but as so often
happens China was quick to get into the
game and grew to hold as much as a 75%
share of the
industry I'm especially interested in
asking Kevin what he thought gave China
that edge in this and in so many other
areas
almost unfathomable how quick the supply
chain is in senen in America it takes
days to receive prototypes for your
designs in senen if you send blueprints
to a factory in the morning they'll
deliver a prototype by the
afternoon it's a paradise for any
entrepreneur working with Hardware in
other places you just can't do this only
in
sension Kevin built his massive Bitcoin
operation in China and then the hammer
came
down China's Central Bank cracked down
on cryptocurrencies calling all crypto
related activities illegal it happened
around the same time as a wide- ranging
Tech Crackdown that also hit social
media companies and online loan
providers as powerful as the Chinese
government is when it comes to rapidly
deploying infastructure like 5G it can
be equally harsh and essentially with
the same strug of a pen it banned
Kevin's entire industry citing the
environmental consequences of Bitcoin
mining ever since we got shut down the
company's been in a tough
position so what happened to Kevin turns
out he wasn't about to give up so easily
he just pulled up stakes and started
over in a new
home where he has been welcomed with
open arms
I love Bitcoin uh because it's it's
bring freedom to people you can protect
your own asset and nobody want nobody
could ever ever could took it from you
so where does it actually exist it's uh
on the
internet Kevin's not alone in Jumping
Ship many entrepreneurs caught in
Chinese Tech crackdowns have relocated
to America they're here because the
Chinese government takes an active role
in steering Innovation policy makers
funnel talent and money into Industries
they view as important at the same time
they shut down Industries they view as
wasteful risky or
frivolous when China shut us down we
immediately complied with the law but in
our
hearts we felt hopeless
we spent so long building so much and it
was all torn down in a single night we
either had to give up or start from
scratch today Kevin and his team of
Bitcoin miners are meeting with Kenneth
Winkles Kevin good morning head of a
Local Economic Development organization
good to see you again sir how manyan
total megawatts will you be utilizing
once you're up and running yeah pH one
is about 100 megaw okay I don't believe
that what happened in China will happen
in the United States I really don't
we've got a very stable type of
government whether you're red or a blue
State you happen to be in a red State
Texas is business friendly so you're not
going to see somebody come in and say no
you can't do that in my backyard
okay crypto was banned in China because
the Chinese state uses its strong
central authority to guide innovation as
it sees fit but is it just driving out
the disruptors and original thinkers
needed to Foster true Innovation there's
no shortage of strong
opinions I've seen many times in Chinese
bookstores there are many many books in
those bookstores that say where is China
Steve Jobs and this is a question that
China itself is asking and so I do
believe ultimately that it's the
combination of the American free market
with our democratic system that
ultimately is best for fostering
innovation A's vision of the
technological future is a little bit
different from California's in its view
a lot of social media companies are
actually creating a lot of social unrest
and frankly it doesn't see a great use
for cryptocurrency which is almost
explicitly designed to be out of state
control there are certainly efforts by
the government to redirect talent and
capital towards so-called hard tech
sectors such as climate Tech such as
electric vehicles
Etc China's government guides Innovation
into areas that it deems important but
can a single institution always choose
the right
winners either way it does seem to be
working for a number of key Industries
and the Chinese model of a heavier State
hand seems to be gaining influence
worldwide the challenge of competing
with China has caused people to reassess
whether the market alone can create and
mobilize the resour sources for
innovation in the United States and the
belief I think is that it can't
especially when you're competing with a
country where the government has been
able to mobilize such vast sums of
resources um in the same areas and so
the US government has put its own thumb
on the scale with the 2022 passage of
the chips and science act injecting
public money into the semiconductor
industry today's computer chips are
easily the most complex devices ever
made and they also seen now as a
critical strategic resource besides
trying to jump domestic production the
US and the West are also trying to keep
the means of production out of China's
hands without advanced semiconductors
there is no way that China can have a
thriving technological industry China is
now out of the Starting Gate in
semiconductors but in the most Rosy view
it is probably at least 5 to 15 years
behind the US in terms of the most
crucial semiconductor
Technologies computer chips are solid
pieces of silicon and metal with
literally billions of tiny electronic
switches packed into a very small space
since the 1970s the key to increasing
the power and speed of computers has
been tied directly to the density of
those
switches as they've shrunk down to the
atomic scale the technology required to
make them has become increasingly costly
and complex
pushing the envelope of Chip Innovation
is like building a pyramid everything
rests on what came below and China's
pyramid is really just getting
started one of the most dramatic
consequences of the trade war with China
was the exposure of China's dependence
on high quality and and high-end
semiconductor chips uh from the United
States and Japan and Korea and Taiwan
and I would say right now that catchup
in the semiconductor space is probably
the single greatest challenge that the
Chinese technology sphere currently
faces and the the highest hill that they
have to
climb this is a Huawei cell phone
factory just a few years ago Huawei was
on track to become the leading maker of
mobile phones in the world then the US
government cut off their access to
Advanced
semiconductors Huawei has had a lot of
different problems with trying to
maintain production there's simply no
way to be a major technology provider if
you don't have the most advanced
semiconductors in the world and so at
this point huawei's revenues have
collapsed mostly because its smartphone
business has collapsed it was at for one
period the second largest smartphone
maker in the world today it is just
barely in the running for being the top
10 largest smartphone makers in the
world in Chandler Arizona I visit an
Intel semiconductor Factory also known
as a
fab here Intel is building a new
state-of-the-art
facility if any one place represents the
front line of the tech War today this is
it welcome to Fab
42 you're in one of Intel's most
advanced
factories very large outfit here that we
run uh with a lot of different people uh
doing various
activities semiconductors process the
data that run through digital devices we
start our process with a bare silicon
wafer it looks like a pizza 300 mm in
diameter Digital Electronics work by
processing our voice the videos we watch
and the data we collect into a binary
code that can be transmitted between
us this is the language of computers and
the
internet what creates this code are
switches called
transistors at the heart of computers
today are tiny Wafers of silicon that
can hold more than 100 billion
transistors in just a few square
cm the switches of today's computers are
only a few atoms wide only visible under
an electron microscope arranged by
millions of minuscule networks they look
like Farmland viewed from 30,000 ft the
connection between them are just as Tiny
on this package itself there are 1.1
million interconnects um and of those
interconnects about 980,000 of those
interconnects are at Intel
state-of-the-art the mind-bogglingly
complex layout of these impossibly small
components is printed onto the Silicon
by lithography using focused ultraviolet
light waves that are just 13 billionths
of a meter long atom by atom different
metals are deposited by Ma of almost
unimaginable
Precision building these chips requires
an infastructure it requires factories
even though the chips are very very tiny
the factories that build them are quite
you know elaborate you have clean rooms
that are 10,000 times cleaner than where
you do heart
surgery each new generation of
fabrication Machinery is an advance on
what came before
it starting in the 1970s Mo's law
predicted that chip technology would
improve so rapidly that the number of
transistors on a chip would double every
months this has held mostly true so far
making it almost impossible for
newcomers to the game to catch up
without relying on equipment produced by
just a few standard setting
companies imagine you have billions of
transistors on a you know if your finger
finger nail if a small defects and I
mean small defects being like like a
size of a you know molecule or even a
DNA the whole thing breaks
apart this Intel Fab is unique for
America it's a little bit like the
Chinese model with research and
development groups embedded within
full-scale manufacturing
facilities I asked researcher Rahul
manopoly what he thought about the
connection between manufacturing and R&D
what is lost when we uh do not do R&D
and Manufacturing in house I think
that's a that's probably a a longer term
VI you got to look at when you stop
doing manufacturing it's not the
immediate generation but the next
generation of products you lose your
expertise in and over time you can lose
expertise in critical skills that are
required to advance the
technology it's not a stretch to say
that here the US is relearning a lesson
that China is already committed to it's
a reminder of what America may have lost
in allowing the decline of its own
manufacturing sector but it's also a
testament to some of America's strengths
we have about 100 phds working in this
facility and uh we we do care about
diversity diversity of thought diversity
of opinion diversity of view as I look
around I see top scientists from many
countries working here
they come from Europe India and even
China to provide different perspectives
on how to solve difficult
problems this is something that I never
really saw in Chinese research labs and
it's one of the many reasons why Chinese
companies are having such a difficult
time catching up in
semiconductors in this facility the most
cuttingedge lithography machines are
from the Netherlands the chip designs
are from California minerals for chipm
processes come from all over the
world producing something as complicated
as a semiconductor requires
International
cooperation there isn't a country in the
world that can do it alone but now China
will have to
try in late 2022 the US government
expanded its Tech war on China new
regulations forced all Americans working
in the semiconductor industry in China
to resign or renounce their citizenship
the restrictions are only expanding in
scope what started as an attempt to
choke select companies like Huawei seems
to be expanding to the entire Chinese
Tech sector it was a very comprehensive
set of rules designed really to to allow
the US to control just exactly what
capability China would have across the
semiconductor manufacturing space and
and so China um faces a a really
significant problem no country has ever
attempted to recreate for example all
the pieces of the semiconductor
manufacturing supply chain on its
own back at Huawei the company is on a
war
footing cut off from the technology it
needs to power their products they know
they need to move fast the way the
Chinese typically respond to efforts
like that is they redouble their efforts
to innovate
internally as you may know our supply of
semiconductors was choked
off we can't make
them but I can feel it the whole of
society is working to find a way out of
this problem of course here in this lab
we are focused on our own
problems but you could say we're working
on the fundamental problem this country
faces how do we get around the pressure
that has been put on
us is another route possible that
doesn't rely on
semiconductors in the Huawei R&D Labs
researchers study how to use light to
process data rather than using
traditional chips losing access to the
most cuttingedge chips has slowed down
the progress of many of the most
prominent Chinese Tech
Giants or has it lit a fire in August
2023 Huawei stunned the World by
announcing a new phone with a 7
nanometer Chinese made chip more
advanced than anything anyone thought
China could make so
quickly it was a real morale boost for
the Chinese Tech
sector China is trying to be held back
but we will innovate ourselves out of
the problem
the rise of Chinese Tech giants has
changed the world China's model of
innovation created World leading
companies while many insist that China
did not come by these gains honestly
relying on intellectual property theft
and predatory pricing they still did it
and they did it with a different ethos
and Manufacturing Focus that challenges
expectations of how Innovation happens
they Rose in a time of globalization but
they're very
triggered a tech
war in my personal opinion it slowed
down the world slowed down the world we
could have been far more advanced in a
lot of areas in healthcare education and
a lot of the industrial applications of
5G because we would have had more
engagement more sharing of ideas rather
than not invented here that's an Eastern
thing we're a western you know that sort
of mentality unfortunate for the world I
think the preference is to be able to be
reduce our dependence on the Chinese
supply chain hyper globalization had
really gone too far and had not taken
sufficiently into account
geopolitics trying to hamstring China's
ability to innovate is really the wrong
answer to the question and if the
question is how can the US become more
competitive it needs to get its own
house in order and compete
Mom it's not
working the reason you can have that
iPhone with so much capability in your
hand is the result of globalization so
that iPhone represents parts coming from
all over the world so what we've seen
over the last 2 years is essentially a
reversal of that process produced in
partnership with the China project what
comes next I don't know but I believe
that Chinese technology will continue to
change the world for better or worse
first
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