China has made a technological leap that worries the United States.

In the weeks leading up to the House and Senate, 13 months of discussions ended and the Science law and CHIPS With $ 280 billion, China’s leading state-backed chip maker has overcome a major technological hurdle that has rocked the world.

Experts are still evaluating how China has apparently taken a step forward in its effort to produce a semiconductor whose circuits are so small, about 10,000 times thinner than a human hair, that rival those produced in Taiwanwhich supplies both China and the West.

The Biden administration has gone to great lengths to keep the highly specialized equipment to produce those chips from Chinese hands, as advances in chip manufacturing are now being examined as a way to define the national power, in the same way as nuclear tests or precision guided missiles. they were during a previous cold war.

No one knows yet whether China can take advantage of the large-scale breakthrough.

It can take years.

But one lesson seemed clear:

As Congress debated, modified, and squabbled over whether and how to support American chip makers and a wide range of research into other technologies, from advanced batteries to robotics to quantum computing, China was moving forward, betting that it would take years in Washington to move forward.

“Our Congress is working for political speedsaid Eric Schmidt, a former CEO of Google who then headed the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, which last year warned of the enormous dangers of stay behind on a “fundamental” technology like advanced semiconductor manufacturing in a world of vulnerable supply chains.

“The Chinese government is working for commercial speed“.

In China, the drive to recover and make the most advanced chips is part of the program.to “Made in China 2025”.

This effort began in 2015.

While few in Congress want to admit the point, the technologies the United States will fund when it is presidential Joe Biden signing the bill, as he promised to do on Thursday, largely replicates the Chinese list.

It is the classic industrial policy, even if the leaders of both parties avoid the term.

The words convey a sense of state-controlled planning that is antithetical to most Republicans and provides direct support and tax credits to some of America’s largest corporations, making some Democrats tremble with rage.

But 2025 isn’t too far off, which means money will flow as the Chinese and other competitors move towards their next set of goals.

Meanwhile, the US semiconductor industry has witheredto the point that none of the most advanced chips are produced in the United States, despite the fact that the fundamental technology originated here and gave its name to Silicon Valley.

None of this means that American competitiveness is doomed.

Just as Japan once appeared to be the 3m tall tech giant in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but then it has lost some of the biggest advances in mobile computing and Windows operating systems and even manufacturing. of chips, China is finding that just the money it does not guarantee technological mastery.

But it helps.

It took Congress much longer to reach the same conclusion.

Anyway, China turned out to be one of the few issues Republicans and Democrats can unite on:

On Thursday, the bill passed in House 243-187, with one abstention.

Twenty-four Republicans voted in favor, particularly because Republican leaders were urging their members to oppose the bill after New York Senator Chuck Schumer, the majority leader, and Senator Joe Manchin, DW.Va., will announce a surprise climate agreement energy and taxes, Wednesday.

China immediately denounced the bill as a move isolationist of Americans trying to free themselves from addiction to foreign technology, a strategy called “decoupling“that China itself is trying to replicate.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian told reporters in Beijing that “no restriction or repression will stop” China’s progress, a clear reference to US and European efforts to deny China the technology that would accelerate its technological independence.

But the big question is whether Congress’s slowness in recognizing America’s competitive shortcomings doomed the effort.

While Biden and lawmakers have tried to support the bill by describing the chips found in everything from refrigerators to thermostats to cars as “oil“of the 21st century, the phrase was already withdrawn three decades ago.

In the late 1980s, Andrew S. Grove, one of the pioneers of Silicon Valley and an early leader of Intel Corp., warned of the danger of the United States becoming a “technocolony“from Japan.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. produces approx 90% of the most advanced semiconductors.

They are sold in both China and the United States.

And as Taiwan Semiconductor and Samsung are building new manufacturing facilities in the United States, responding to political pressures to address the concerns of the American supply chainthe net result will be that only a single-digit percentage of its production will be on US soil.

“Our reliance on Taiwan for sophisticated chips is unsustainable and insecure,” Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo told the Aspen Security Forum last week.

With the increase in demand for more sophisticated chips (each new generation of cars requires more and more semiconductors), “we don’t have enough national offer“.

He argued that the bill’s $ 52 billion in federal subsidies would be backed by private money and turned into “hundreds of billions” of investments.

Basically, he was using the argument that the federal government has been using for a long time to justify the incentives to defense contractors.

Politicians knew that supporting a risky new spy satellite technology, or stealth drones, was an easier sale in Congress if it were described as critical defense spending rather than industrial policy.

But now the logic is reversed.

What defense contractors need are the most advanced commercial chips, not only for the F-35s, but also for the artificial intelligence systems that may someday change the nature of the battlefield.

The old distinctions between military and commercial technology have been considerably eroded.

That’s why, to pass the bill, the administration also hired the Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austinin the pressure campaign, arguing that they cannot depend on foreign suppliers for the weapons of the future.

The bill’s authors say that while they lag behind in rebuilding the industry, starting today is better than continuing to watch American leadership erode.

Senator Todd Young, R-Indiana, said that while China’s recent advance was “sobering”, he didn’t think there was “anyone who could innovate more than the United States of America if we mobilize our many resources.

The other advantage of the United States is “our relations, economic and geopolitical, with other countries,” Young said.

“China has no friends; they have been vassals.

Innovation has been an American force; This is where the microprocessor was invented.

But over and over, American vulnerability is in flux.

And China is not the only competitor.

To extort money from Congress, Intel and others noted that Germany and other allies were trying to entice it to build “fabs” (the centers for the production of pristine and airtight chips) on its territory.

But in the end it was China that led the votes.

One of the first evaluations of the new Chinese chip by Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. came from researchers at a company called TechInsights.

After reverse engineering the Chinese-made chip, they concluded that it used a circuit that was only 7 nanometers wide.

Recently, in 2020, Chinese manufacturers struggled to drop below 40 nanometers.

Experts say the chip, made for cryptocurrency mining, may have been based or stolen from Taiwan Semiconductor.

For now, Taiwan Semiconductor remains the world’s largest single manufacturer, and its sprawling facilities near Taipei may be the island’s best protection against invasion.

China cannot afford the risk of its destruction.

And the United States cannot afford to see it destroyed.

But that delicate balance won’t last forever.

So China has both a commercial and a geopolitical reason for producing the fastest chips in the world, and the US has a competitive reason to stop Beijing from getting the technology to do so.

It is the last arms race of the 21st century.

In the old Cold War, the war against the Soviet Union a generation ago, “the government could afford to sit on the sidelines” and wait for private industry to invest, Schumer said Wednesday.

Now, he said, “we can’t afford to sit on the sidelines.”

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