Apple Inc and Walt Disney Co are among US businesses that would face the steepest challenges in a “selective decoupling” from China, a key US lawmaker said after a series of meetings with executives and experts in Hollywood and Silicon Valley last week.
US Representative Mike Gallagher, the chairman of a US House of Representatives committee focused on US-China competition, met with Apple CEO Tim Cook and Disney CEO Bob Iger as part of a three-day trip through California to learn more about how companies are navigating the tensions between the world’s two largest economies.
“Apple’s at the heart of what is the most complex aspect of this competition, which is companies that have a massive presence in China are going have to deal with the fact that some form of selective economic decoupling is inevitable,” Gallagher said in a telephone interview. “It’s going to continue.”
Photo: Reuters
Gallagher, a Republican from Wisconsin, and his Democratic counterpart, US Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi, led a group of about a half dozen lawmakers through a jam-packed program filled with meetings with technology and entertainment executives. The agenda included a lunch with Cook and executives from Alphabet Inc’s Google, Microsoft Corp and Palantir Technologies Inc, and dinner with about a dozen prominent venture capitalists, including Marc Andreessen and Vinod Khosla.
Lawmakers also met with Iger and other Hollywood executives to discuss concerns over US entertainment companies censoring their content for the Chinese market.
The trip was part of an effort by lawmakers on the newly created committee to get outside of Washington and to hear from the private sector.
Gallagher said that despite the recent tensions — including military maneuvers by China in response to President Tsai Ing-Wen’s (蔡英文) visit to New York and California — he does not see a total break from China in the near future.
Instead, there would be “selective decoupling” that would see some supply chains of sensitive materials gradually moved out of China, a process he acknowledges is complicated and costly for companies.
He said that in his conversations with industry executives, most want “bright clear lines from the government” about which areas of the Chinese economy they should stay away from.
There was “near unanimous” support for outbound investment restrictions on investments in Chinese-developed artificial intelligence, Gallagher said, as well as curbs on investments in other key areas such as quantum computing, bioengineering, advanced semiconductors and other technologies that could be used for military purposes.
US President Joe Biden’s administration has been working on a program that would restrict investments in some sectors of China’s economy and require reporting on other areas, but those plans have yet to be finalized.
Gallagher said he does not see the US Congress acting on legislation on outbound investments until lawmakers see what the administration has planned.
The one exception to the selective decoupling scenario is if China does decide to take military action against Taiwan, in which case all bets are off, Gallagher said.
“I think there’s still a tendency for people to discount the likelihood of a kinetic confrontation with China over Taiwan,” he said. “We still have questions we want to ask these companies and this was the beginning of a much broader and longer line of effort for the select committee.”
China’s Huawei Technologies Co (華為) plans to start mass-producing its most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chip in the first quarter of next year, even as it struggles to make enough chips due to US restrictions, two people familiar with the matter said. The telecoms conglomerate has sent samples of the Ascend 910C — its newest chip, meant to rival those made by US chipmaker Nvidia Corp — to some technology firms and started taking orders, the sources told Reuters. The 910C is being made by top Chinese contract chipmaker Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯) on its N+2 process, but a lack
NVIDIA PLATFORM: Hon Hai’s Mexican facility is to begin production early next year and a Taiwan site is to enter production next month, Nvidia wrote on its blog Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密), the world’s biggest electronics manufacturer, yesterday said it is expanding production capacity of artificial intelligence (AI) servers based on Nvidia Corp’s Blackwell chips in Taiwan, the US and Mexico to cope with rising demand. Hon Hai’s new AI-enabled factories are to use Nvidia’s Omnivores platform to create 3D digital twins to plan and simulate automated production lines at a factory in Hsinchu, the company said in a statement. Nvidia’s Omnivores platform is for developing industrial AI simulation applications and helps bring facilities online faster. Hon Hai’s Mexican facility is to begin production early next year and the
AVIATION BOOM: CAL is to renew its passenger and cargo fleets starting next year on record profits as aviation continues to return to pre-pandemic levels China Airlines Ltd (CAL, 中華航空) yesterday said it is optimistic about next year’s business outlook, as the airline continues to renew its fleet on expectations that global passenger traffic would maintain steady growth and air cargo demand would remain strong. From next year to 2028, the airline is to welcome a new Boeing Co 787 fleet — 18 787-9 and six 787-10 passenger aircraft — to cover regional and medium to long-haul destinations, CAL chairman Hsieh Shih-chien (謝世謙) said at an investors’ conference in Taipei. The airline would also continue to introduce Airbus SE 321neo passenger planes and Boeing 777F cargo jets,
Who would not want a social media audience that grows without new content? During the three years she paused production of her short do-it-yourself (DIY) farmer’s lifestyle videos, Chinese vlogger Li Ziqi (李子柒), 34, has seen her YouTube subscribers increase to 20.2 million from about 14 million. While YouTube is banned in China, her fan base there — although not the size of YouTube’s MrBeast, who has 330 million subscribers — is close to 100 million across the country’s social media platforms Douyin (抖音), Sina Weibo (新浪微博) and Xiaohongshu (小紅書). When Li finally released new videos last week — ending what has
RSS