In 2019, the US government imposed sanctions on Huawei that were supposed to prevent Huawei from accessing the latest generation chips and the technologies to design and manufacture them. If first of all, the Chinese giant has indeed suffered the blow, it seems that it has found a way to develop its own processors and its own technologies.
The Middle Kingdom has found a solution to circumvent the American embargo. By releasing its new high-end smartphone, the Huawei Mate 60 Pro, the company, but also through it, Beijing, send a message to the United States : it does not need its technologies to manufacture cutting-edge devices. . Certainly, the Kirin chip used by the Mate 60 Pro is far from being as efficient as the most recent SoCs from Qualcomm or even Apple.
Read — Huawei Mate 60 Pro: 3 new models arriving soon, including a Porsche edition
If the Chinese processor is engraved at 7 nm when the A17 Pro of the iPhone 15 Pro is engraved at 3 nm, we must admit that the embargo imposed by Donald Trump in 2019 did not succeed in putting China ten years late, as planned by the White House. Thus, in the opinion of experts, China’s current technological delay would rather be of the order of four years.
By releasing the Mate 60 Pro, Huawei and China send a message to the United States
Signs of hostility are increasing between Beijing and Washington. China is now banning iPhones from its officials and reserving some rare metals for domestic production, while President Biden plans to further expand export restrictions to China on some U.S. technology.
But as Bloomberg points out, “the fight is not so much about smartphones as it is about strategically important applications such as artificial intelligence and supercomputers, also used in the military field”, in long-distance guided missiles or even fleets of highly armed drones directed by AI, For example. Some experts say China won’t be able to sustain the colossal investments needed to create a semiconductor manufacturing sector, but on the other hand, U.S. policy is seen as unproductive and ineffective.