Wei Dai comments on Preventing a US-China war as a policy priority

[Wei Dai]

absent a war, China can hope to achieve parity with the West (by which I mean the countries allied with the US including South Korea and Japan) on the hardware side by buying chips from Taiwan like everyone else

Apparently this is no longer true as of Oct 2022. From https://​​twitter.com/​​jordanschnyc/​​status/​​1580889364233539584:

Summary from Lam Research, which is involved with these new sanctions:

1. All Chinese advanced computing chip design companies are covered by these sanctions, and TSMC will no longer do any tape-out for them from now on;

This was apparently based on this document, which purports to be a transcript of a Q&A session with a Lam Research official. Here’s the relevant part in Chinese (which is consistent with the above tweet):

Q：台积电/​Global Foundry给中国流片受到什么影响？

高算力芯片给中国继续流片有困难，可以提供先进制程但是非高算力的芯片，高算力芯片给了相应的指标定义。如果是28家实体清单的企业是全部芯片都不能流片。