Marketplace Tech · Thursday, September 24, 2026
Sam Sachs explained that US export controls on advanced semiconductors and manufacturing equipment to China have had a counter-intuitive effect. While intended to limit China's AI development, these restrictions have instead spurred growth in China's domestic AI industry, making it less reliant on US technology.
“Starting in the Biden administration, the US government put controls not just on advanced semiconductors going to Chinese end-users, but also on the manufacturing equipment. The Chinese side has not responded favorably to this.”
“It has curtailed their access to the compute needed to train new models, but also to do what's called inference, where you ask a model to reason and perform tasks on your behalf. So this is one of the main inputs that any country needs to develop and make use of AI.”
“But what's also happened is that in the absence of US technology, the Chinese domestic industry has kicked into gear and I think they're increasingly weaning off reliance of the US. So it's become counter-intuitively less of a choke point than I think the US side may have intended.”