South Korea has emerged as a rare bright spot among East Asian economies trading with China, as booming demand for memory chips pushes its balance with its largest trading partner back into a surplus. The country’s trade position with China had strengthened steadily this year, swinging from a US$764 million deficit in December 2025 to a US$1.1 billion surplus in February, before widening further to US$3.8 billion in May, according to data from South Korea’s Ministry of Trade, Industry and...
The US Department of Commerce on Sunday moved to close a year-old potential loophole it had created that may have led companies to export the world’s most advanced chips – such as Nvidia’s most sophisticated Rubin and Blackwell processors, as well as AMD’s MI350x – to Chinese entities located outside China. The unexpected guidance suggests the United States’ best artificial intelligence chips may have been making their way to the subsidiaries of Chinese AI firms based in places such as Malaysia...
Nvidia has not generated any revenue from H200 chip sales to China and remains uncertain whether the product will be allowed into the country, the US chip giant said on Wednesday, underscoring how geopolitics continues to cloud its access to one of the world’s largest AI markets even as global demand for its data centre processors surged to a record high. While Washington has approved licences for H200 shipments to China-based customers, Colette Kress, Nvidia’s executive vice-president and chief...
The global AI boom is driving orders back to Chinese foundries as overseas rivals shift production towards high-margin AI chips and high-bandwidth memory, creating a shortage in mature-node semiconductors, according to the head of China’s top contract chipmaker. “AI demand has directly pushed power-management and other mature capacity into shortage,” said Zhao Haijun, co-CEO of Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC), during the company’s first-quarter earnings call on...
The Dutch government has objected to a proposed US law that would further restrict semiconductor equipment giant ASML from selling to China and servicing customers in the country. The Dutch company, the global market leader in the lithographic technology used to laser-print tiny circuits onto microchips, has seen its access to the Chinese market severely hampered by US sanctions. Now, as US lawmakers look to further choke the European outfit off from the Chinese market, The Hague has lodged an...