TSMC's chip technology is found to have been used in the artificial intelligence (AI) chip of the Huawei Ascend 910B. This shows that the Chinese telecommunications giant is still able to bypass the technological barriers imposed by the United States on them since 2019. TSMC was contacted by TechnInsight who found TSCM-made components on the Ascend 910B.
Due to this discovery, TSMC has reported this incident to the U.S. Department of Commerce to avoid being accused of circumventing the imposed barriers. After Huawei was put on the list of entities, they could no longer use TSMC's services to produce their own designed Ascend and Kirin chips because of the presence of US-owned technology. Huawei has released a statement saying they will no longer use TSMC's services to produce chips from 2020.
In fact, this year ASML will no longer sell spare parts and offer technical assistance on their old machines produced in China to prevent them from being modified to produce more recent chips.
The technology restrictions imposed on Huawei are seen as an effort to prevent China from overtaking the United States as the world's technology leader. In addition, Chinese companies are also prevented from buying the latest AI chips from NVIDIA and AMD.