The problem with trying to stop chip restrictions to China is that it’s easy enough for people in other countries to buy them, mark up the prices and then re-sell them to China. That might be ‘illegal’ but with the stakes so high, it’s a loophole that will be infinitely exploited. We’ve seen the same thing in Russia where — despite western sanctions — nearly everything is still easily available.
Still, the US is persisting.
The WSJ now reports that there will be a tier of countries that face limits on the number of chips they can import, primarily in Southeast Asia and the Middle East. I’d suspect it’s likely that the US is tracking chips to see which ones end up in China.
It’s a tough battle. Just this week, OpenAI released its Sora video model but China may be moving even faster as Tencent’s open source model easily beats it, and it’s open source.