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China Businesses

China Injects $2.2 Billion Into Local Chip Firm (bloomberg.com) 50

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
China's state-backed funds pumped $2.25 billion into a Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. wafer plant to support advanced-chip making as Washington tightens technology restrictions on the Asian nation. From a report: The Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. plant's registered capital jumps from $3.5 billion to $6.5 billion after the investment, the company said in an announcement on Friday. The chipmaker's stake in the Shanghai facility will drop from 50.1% to 38.5%, it said. The plant has capacity to produce 6,000 14-nanometer wafers a month and plans to boost that to 35,000. The new investment came as Washington moved to prevent sales to Huawei by chipmakers using U.S. technology. The Commerce Department on Friday said it would require licenses before allowing U.S. technology to be used by the Chinese company or its 114 subsidiaries, including its chip-design unit HiSilicon.
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China Injects $2.2 Billion Into Local Chip Firm More

China Injects $2.2 Billion Into Local Chip Firm

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  • Good on them. Chinaâ(TM)s agenda is to make chips and everything else in China by 2025. This would be a priority regardless of trade disputes etc.
  • Anyone know if these are 300 or 450mm? I am thinking likely 450. Article did not mention what the schedule was either. 1 year, 2years? TSMC might be rethinking that AZ plant.

    • Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday May 18, 2020 @04:08PM (#60075136)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re:300 or 450 (Score:4, Interesting)

        by ghoul ( 157158 ) on Monday May 18, 2020 @04:13PM (#60075168)

        The Saudi and US engineered oil crash of the 80s bankrupted the Soviet Union. If oil had kept high Soviet Union could have spent its way out of any problem.

        Next time you wonder why the US is best buds with a head chopping regime remember they helped us win the Cold War.

        • Comment removed based on user account deletion

          • No. That is silly fantasy-land stuff, Ivan.

            Oil production is a tiny part of the US economy.

            Oil production is where Russia and Saudi Arabia get most of their state funds.

            Therefore, it is not possible that they are doing the exact same things to the US. If they think they're doing that it is hilarious, because they'd bankrupt their own economies and only delay new US wells by a couple years.

            More likely they're fighting each other for market share in a price war that hurts them both, and helps the US economy b

        • Mikhail Gorbachev blamed the Chernobyl accident. Who knows the main cause, but I doubt yours is true. The USSR was working on making Europe dependent upon its natural gas reserves, and it was building its infrastructure for doing so on stolen US tech. That was where the USSR was looking to make its money while simultaneously trying to control Europe's economy. Of course, that all failed rather spectacularly:

          https://www.telegraph.co.uk/ne... [telegraph.co.uk]

          Interestingly, China is growing eerily similar to the USSR in that i

      • Have you seen the US deficit for this year? 2T is nothing.

      • The Soviet Union's bankruptcy was due to attempting to match US military spending on stuff that provides little economic return (unless you are Boeing, even less so in old USSR), like missiles and war planes.

        In China's case, it is spending to expand it's production of consumer goods that can be profitably sold around the globe

        Two different cases, and you are just looking stupid since you do not seem to recognize the difference

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by vlad30 ( 44644 )

          In China's case, it is spending to expand it's production of consumer goods that can be profitably sold around the globe

          If people want to buy it currently there is a ground swell that average Joe doesn't want Chinese products, companies are looking to move manufacturing to other countries even some governments https://www.bloomberg.com/news... [bloomberg.com] are looking to remove a bad actor from the stage.

      • Chinese companies are just tentacles of a much larger organism; the state. 2 Billion is nothing. 2 TRILLION is nothing. When you factor in state sponsored programs, they print whatever money is required.

        I never said it won't end badly. Such expenditures bankrupted the Soviet Union.

        The Chinese state seems to have a considerably more effective reign of terror than Russia ever did. The Three Gorges Dam exists and generates gigawatts of power. Russians would have told the world they built a dam and pocketed the money, to spend on hookers and blow. China gets results when it prints money. The facile analysis is, "Oh, they're just a communist dictatorship. They're all alike." Nope, they're not. Manifestly they're not.

      • That was my thinking too; what is the story here?

        The company was building a new factory that it was going to own 50.1% of, and their Government stepped in and nationalized a portion of the company so that they only control 38.5% of their new factory.

        They were paid using soft money. And they better like the deal, or Darth Xi will alter it further.

    • Re:300 or 450 (Score:4, Insightful)

      by drhank1980 ( 1225872 ) on Monday May 18, 2020 @05:01PM (#60075338)

      These are without a doubt 300mm wafers. All the big semiconductor manufacturing vendors remember getting burned on the 200mm to 300mm conversion. Because it took much longer than planned to make their initial investment on that transition back, anything bigger hasn't happened anywhere other than as proof of concept demos as far I know. The R&D cost of building whole new tool platforms for bigger wafers is so massive that only a handful of customers would even be interesting is supporting it. I expect 300mm will be the high volume wafer size for quite a while.

      SMIC is a great place to run a cheap wafer on possibly a ripped-off TSMC process from a few years ago. They have even had to settle in court over stealing IP [reuters.com]. So I would expect this is much more about increasing capacity on the older generation 14nm and larger processes than pushing ahead to really compete at 5nm and beyond.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      Doesn't matter. $2B is pretty much just halfsies on a single cutting edge line.

      A new fab costs tens to hundred billion dollars, depending on the technology. $2B can buy an ancient fab, which is still useful for some things. The latest sub-10nm fabs ramp up from $10B or more - the machines themselves are billion dollar investments.

      I'm just surprised how low the investment is - you would expect China to do $20B or so which would buy at least one line.

    • AZ plant will be like Foxconn plant. A lot of subsidies for meager setup that won't compete with Taiwanese plants. They aren't stupid.
  • The world needs to stop putting up with China's bullshit. I think we can all assume that 100% of the work going on there will be from stolen IP, violates patents, hacked corporate info etc. Oh no, it's international so it's basically impossible to do anything in courts. Cool. Trump should drone strike the facility. See if they steal any more commercial secrets after that. He should hit the Indian call centers scamming money from the elderly and mentally disabled too. You want to put a stop to something? Put

    • Re:I have a solution (Score:4, Interesting)

      by garyisabusyguy ( 732330 ) on Monday May 18, 2020 @05:47PM (#60075556)

      We had a really great opportunity under the TPP to unify the markets of the Pacific rim into a unified bargaining platform and used TRADE to bring China's behavior around...

      But no, too many people got suckered in by the "Globalism took muh jooooob" bait and ended up voting for some loser who claimed to have a secret plan...

      almost funny, I sure hope the general population learns from this

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by vlad30 ( 44644 )
        Correct that the TPP would have put china on notice which it did China used political and financial influence to disrupt the smaller nations and then make its own trade deals including one with Australia which it has now shown it will change the rules whenever they feel it is in their interest. Trade deals take too long to negotiate and implement by the time it was negotiated they are watered down to suit the biggest players. Also you need to take into account of differences in attitude with different cultu

      • almost funny, I sure hope the general population learns from this

        I wouldn't bet a single cent on that. More likely the opposite.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by vlad30 ( 44644 )
        And the graphs here show the agreement wasn't necessary for Australia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

        the dip in Chinese imports was another negotiating tactic otherwise either side of the agreement the growth in Australian exports to China is very much the same. The point could be made the profit percentage was better before the deal.

      • Here is a comic explaining exactly how the TPP was an awful, awful idea for the American people. [economixcomix.com] Multi-billion dollar companies would have done very well, though. It would have put American workers in direct competition with Thai and other countries' labor. The TPP was first and foremost designed to maximize prices paid by other nations for patented goods, and to establish the ISDS - a system of courts staffed by corporate appointed judges, with the power to supersede sovereignty of local governments. Th

        • >>Trump is more punk rock than Jello

          fyi,trump is the least punk rock thing ever. If punk was still alive,they would be wiping their asses with his image on their album covers

    • You know, they can easily do the same to TSMC fabs in return. Huawei will simply license their chipset tech if they can't produce it. One company per chip, so yanks don't have a valid excuse to return the favor. And terrorize Qualcomm a bit as well.

  • China is playing Monopoly with the rules of Go.

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