Taiwan raided the local offices of US IT firm Super Micro over allegations that it helped smuggle Nvidia chips into China, underscoring the geopolitical importance of the world’s most advanced semiconductors.
Washington has banned the export of cutting-edge chips to China, citing fears that they could give the Asian giant a leg up in the global AI race.
However, Beijing’s advantages in other layers of the computing stack — including abundant access to lower-level semiconductors and cheap energy — have given its tech firms a shot at keeping up with their American counterparts: On Tuesday, Chinese tech giant Meituan unveiled what it said was the most advanced AI model trained exclusively on home-grown hardware, the South China Morning Post reported.