Since October 2022, the most important product decisions in AI hardware have been made partly in Washington. Here is the machinery of the chip war without the jargon.
What the rules restrict
Three chokeholds, applied in escalating rounds: chips above performance and interconnect thresholds (A100/H100-class, then the A800/H800 workarounds in 2023, with successive thresholds after); tools to make advanced chips — EUV was never exportable to China, and DUV plus service followed via Dutch and Japanese alignment; and people and money — US persons supporting Chinese advanced fabs, HBM sales, and entity-listed firms (Huawei, SMIC and hundreds more). The stated goal: hold China's frontier compute several generations back.
How China adapted
Three visible strategies. Substitution: Huawei's Ascend line on SMIC's EUV-less 7 nm — technically real, economically painful (yield), supported by state purchase mandates. Efficiency: DeepSeek-style engineering that wrings frontier results from constrained hardware — the result that made 'controls are working/failing' a simultaneous headline pair. Openness: exporting influence through open weights (Qwen, GLM, Kimi) when exporting chips is impossible.
How the rules keep moving
Policy has oscillated with administrations and negotiations: 2025 brought both tightening (new entity listings) and selective loosening (H20-class sales resumed under a revenue-sharing arrangement — an unprecedented structure), plus proposals conditioning advanced-chip access on US-alignment (the G42 template). Every record in this database that touches China carries a date for exactly this reason: the rules are a time series, not a fact.
The scorecard debate
Hawks point to China's absent EUV, constrained HBM and CloudMatrix's power-hungry workarounds. Critics point to accelerated substitution, lost US vendor revenue funding rivals' R&D cuts, and diffusion through open weights anyway. Independent analysts split. Our practice: report capability with basis labels, report policy with dates, and link the primary sources — the reader keeps the scorecard.
