US chip ban doesn’t work: China continues to use them for nuclear development

It turned out that in the last two years alone, the main nuclear research institute in China was able to purchase more than twelve American chips and processors, despite the total ban. The State Institute continued to purchase proprietary chips made by Intel and Nvidia, despite being blacklisted by the US for China’s nuclear industry in 1997, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The PRC simply bypasses the bans: it buys processors from Chinese vendors or borrows it from colleagues, for example, from the laboratory of an institute working on computational fluid dynamics. You can also create a network of shell companies abroad and officially buy chips. Overall, it’s incredibly difficult to track where and why chips are shipped to China, as in 2021 alone, China bought more than a third of global chip sales totaling $556 billion, according to the US Semiconductor Industry Association.

According to a study by journalists, most chips purchased by Chinese nuclear scientists range in size from 7 to 14 nm and are easily available on the open market: versions of Intel Xeon Gold and Nvidia GeForce RTX chips purchased by Chinese scientists can be purchased at: Any Chinese market. The acquisitions did not include the latest generation chips released in the last two years.

Journalists scanned a catalog of scientific papers published by Chinese nuclear scientists and found that at least 34 articles over the past decade referred to the use of American semiconductors. It has been used in a variety of ways, including data analysis and the creation of algorithms.

Also, Chinese nuclear scientists who need supercomputers are being asked by unsuspecting small companies to make supercomputers for themselves. Then scientists with their help calculate the nuclear reaction and design warheads.

Six of the seven research papers published by Chinese scientists were related to nuclear stock maintenance, including the most recently published inertial confinement fusion, or ICF, which involves using high-power lasers to create fusion reactions similar to those occurring in ICF. large scale in thermonuclear weapons.

By the way, Chinese scientists do not hide the fact that they use American chips in their work. In six articles, they described the use of GPUs and other chips to improve the performance of ICF devices. For example, they focused on using an Intel Core i7-7800X processor and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti graphics card.

Separately, in 2017, researchers at the Beijing Institute of Applied Physics and Computational Mathematics wrote about the key role of Intel chips in China’s Tianhe-2 supercomputer and the analysis of nuclear reactors.

Intel and Nvidia say the chips listed cannot be controlled in any way because they are heavily used in consumer models and are not proprietary devices. But companies are doing their best to maintain their government’s sanctions.

American journalists note with dismay that China is accelerating the expansion of its nuclear powers. According to expert estimates, by 2035, the Chinese army can accumulate about 1,500 nuclear warheads, which is 3.5 times more than at present.

Previously Focus He wrote that China is a leader in the export of fighter jets, as the Celestial Empire engineers copy Western technologies and make their own models based on them.