The secret recipient of TSMC chips for Huawei turned out to be a company associated with the Chinese Bitmain

Over the past week, a variety of sources have repeatedly discussed events that allegedly took place in previous months, when US sanctions against Huawei Technologies were already in effect. Sources now claim that it obtained advanced chips for its accelerators from TSMC through a Chinese shell company linked to Bitmain.

Strictly speaking, as Reuters notes with reference to its own sources and the publication The Information, the ongoing investigation, the reason for which was the revelations of TechInsights experts and the complaint of TSMC itself, has reason to assume that the Chinese company Sophgo received from the Taiwanese manufacturer the necessary accelerators Huawei Ascend 910B chips. She technically ordered them for herself, but when it emerged in the middle of this month that they had ended up being used by Huawei, Taiwan’s TSMC stopped supplying orders to the customer in question.

Traditionally, there have been no official comments on this matter, and TSMC continues to insist that it has not supplied chips to Huawei’s needs since September 2020, and has no information about an ongoing investigation that would affect its interests. The Chinese company Sophgo, as Reuters found out, was founded by the same person as Bitmain, a well-known developer of chips for mining equipment outside of China. They even have the same corporate email domains. Bitmain itself was accused by the Taiwanese authorities of poaching specialists on the island, and its accomplices were fined. Sophgo’s website says the company has more than 10 research centers in China and other countries.

Bloomberg incidentally notes that the company’s founder, Morris Chang, and current CEO, C.C. Wei, who took part in events organized by TSMC, did not comment on the Huawei scandal, but spoke about development trends in the semiconductor industry. The company’s retired founder said that “free trade in cutting-edge semiconductor components is dead” and TSMC will have a harder time maintaining business growth under such conditions. He also figuratively put it that “TSMC is the fertile soil that all the major powers on the planet are trying to get their hands on.”

Against this background, Xi Xi Wei spoke about more mundane things. He responded that he was confident in TSMC’s ability to widen its lead over competitors in the technology space. In his opinion, the company is playing an increasingly significant role in the global semiconductor industry. Construction of the Arizona facility is proceeding according to plan and without any major problems.