US Commerce Chief says Huawei chip breakthrough news is ‘incredibly disturbing’

In a recent Senate Commerce Committee hearing, US Commerce Department Chief, Gina Raimondo said that the new Huawei chip breakthrough news is incredibly disturbing.

Raimondo added that U.S. commerce needs to increase efforts to enforce more authority over export control laws. Simply put, she was talking about extending bans and further restricting technology transfer/sales.

“We need different tools, we need additional resources around enforcement,” told Raimondo.

She also brought a legislative proposal that would further expand US Commerce’s authority over all sales and business of US products and US technology-based products.

Raimondo mentioned the fine on Seagate Technology, which paid $300 million in penalty in a settlement with U.S. authorities for shipping over $1.1 billion worth of hard disks to Huawei.

“We’re tough as we need to be, but we need more resources,” she told the committee.

Back in August, the US Commerce Chief conducted her visit to China to improve ties with Beijing. Coincidently, Huawei also released the new Mate 60 Pro flagship phone at that time.

This sparked the controversy of Huawei bringing back its own Kirin chipset, which has been missing in action since 2020. Teardown from TechInsights began to trend in the global media and claimed that the new Kirin chip is using 7nm advanced processing technology from China’s SMIC.

This news raised eyebrows in Washington, Raimondo said in her last month’s testimony that the US has found no evidence that China can produce an advanced 7nm chip on a scale. However, she’s also under immense pressure from other US politicians.

Back in 2019, the US added Huawei to the Entity List, which prohibits the company from purchasing US-based technologies. The new resurgence of the Kirin chip is causing brainstorming in the industry about its origin and the technology used to build such chips.

(source – Bloomberg)