To avoid U.S. sanctions, Chinese companies artificially reduce speed of their chips

The new U.S. export restrictions on China have forced Chinese companies to change their approach to chip design. They are now trying to artificially slow down their chips to avoid being sanctioned by Washington and suffering the fate of HiSilicon, which developed chips for Huawei and lost a significant portion of its customers to U.S. pressure.

Alibaba, startup Biren Technology and other chip makers that have spent millions of dollars creating advanced processors and acceleration units (including those related to artificial intelligence) for supercomputers and data centers are now forced to reduce the speed of their chips to be able to use the services of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), a Taiwanese chip maker.

It is known that TSMC has stopped producing 7nm chips for the Biren BR100 computing acceleration system, fearing that they would be subject to U.S. export restrictions. The problem is that TSMC, like any other semiconductor factory, finds it difficult to accurately estimate the computing capabilities of specific chips. That's why the company suggests that Chinese buyers clarify the parameters of their chips themselves and sign declarations of responsibility for the data provided. In Biren's case, the TSMC chips are taken off the market by the developers themselves, who advertised the capabilities of their chips.

According to Chinese experts, it is difficult to determine whether a particular chip falls under U.S. restrictions or not. This is determined by such an indicator as the speed of two-way data transmission, and the explanations in the documentation on this subject are not clear. In the case of chips, according to U.S. sanctions, this figure must not exceed 600 GB/s.

What tricks do manufacturers use? 

While Biren previously cited a 640GB/s transfer rate for the BR100 accelerator, the company's website now lists a figure that – according to the Bernstein research group calculations – is 576GB/s. According to a Biren employee, who spoke on condition of anonymity, the company has begun fixing the chip designs to slow them down, in the hope that TSMC will produce them.

Dylan Patel, chief analyst for the research group that first noticed the changes in Biren chip specifications, said developers are trying to slow the chip down by disabling some of its components. He is skeptical that such a trick will be approved by U.S. regulators, since the design of the chip does not really change its structure, and there is no guarantee that it will not run at full capacity in the future.

Sources told the Financial Times that to avoid U.S. restrictions, developers at Alibaba's T-Head unit also intend to change their new 5-nm processor designed to work with artificial intelligence. A T-Head spokesman responded to the newspaper's request for comment, saying: "T-Head's core products are solely for Alibaba Group's own use and comply with all applicable regulations."