China imports more chips as a country than it imports oil. Chips are what the future struggle between USA and West vs China is going to be. Amazing book about this is Chip Wars by Chris Miller.

Chips rule the modern warfare. Why is Russia attacking so many civilian buildings? Part of it might be terrorism, but I think bigger story is that they got starved of chips and precision rockets. Javelins that helped Ukrainians stop the war at the beginning, each have 200 modern chips inside.

The struggle of having modern chips is only going to increase, with more and more weapons becoming full of AI systems. Will China be able to survive chip choke? It's high on their list to improve their capabilities in production, and I believe one of the major goals before they can afford to invade Taiwan

This will boost adoption of non US chips by everyone else, and eventually other non US based technologies as well, as other companies take care not to be the next one on the target line.

We are back at the PGP export regulations days.

Doesn't that make a conflict in Taiwan more likely? I understand the national interest of the west here but it doesn't look like a good solution if the result is war over taiwan.

I am struggling to make sense of this; if you go to a German mediamarkt (biggest electronic store here) Huawei still have a sizable presence with nice Intel based laptops and more curious android open source phones. All using American chips. This ban will kill this off.

Why now? Seems to be driven by internal US politics or perhaps a preparation for next meeting between US and Chinese officials (which seems to be going worse and worse on purpose).

Alternatively the US sees a strategic threat from Huawei’s HarmonyOS, which if it gets popular, and it requires good hardware to get popular, will be the first real non-US consumer operating system.

Won't intermediate companies in other countries just buy them and turn around and sell to China?

I dunno, you look at what China has accomplished the last 30 years and I struggle to see this being effective in the mid- to long- term. Economics has a funny way favouring people who are more willing to let the market work.

The US government is sitting more in the passengers seat here than the short term policy power they have suggests. The Chinese will only do badly here if the Chinese Communist Party does something stupid (so, to be fair, there are reasonable odds that they will disembowel their own tech industry in a few years).