The US communications regulator voted on June 29 to close a 'legacy loophole', requiring carriers to remove older Huawei and ZTE infrastructure installed before 2019 that had been excluded from prior ban orders, with reimbursement funds proving insufficient to cover full replacement costs
US Bureau of Industry and Security restrictions, in force since 2022, limit sales of advanced semiconductors and chipmaking equipment to China, determining who can build AI at scale.
China's premier hardware-and-deep-tech city, a 13-million-person Special Economic Zone north of Hong Kong hosting Huawei, Tencent, and DJI and anchoring a US$35bn robotics industry.
China's largest domestic chip foundry, blocked from EUV lithography by the US Entity List since 2020, now producing 7nm chips for Huawei's AI and mobile programs.
China's lead foundry scales N+2 output for Ascend 910C/910D as Huawei targets ~600k dies; HBM and yields, not lithography, are now the bottleneck
After a year of bans and reversals, the US approved limited H200 sales, then Beijing told firms to pause and pushed Huawei instead