Export controls on US chipmakers selling into China, first put in place under the Biden administration, have carried over largely intact into the second Trump administration, with senators from both parties, including Elizabeth Warren, Jim Banks, Chuck Schumer, and Tom Cotton, pushing to keep the restrictions in force. Forbes reports that the policy's most visible costs are the sales Nvidia, AMD, and Intel are giving up in one of the world's largest chip markets, but argues the real damage runs deeper than the headline numbers.
The clearest sign of that deeper cost, according to Forbes, is showing up in the results of the Chinese chipmakers export controls were designed to hold back. Hua Hong reported a 385 percent jump in second quarter profit, and Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation reported growth of 267 percent over the same period, gains the companies tied to demand for domestic artificial intelligence chips that fall outside the reach of US controls.
Forbes argues that lost sales are the least of it. The bigger loss is what the piece calls customer knowledge, the deep, ongoing relationships that let a chipmaker understand exactly how its products are being used and where the next generation of demand is heading. Cut off from large parts of the Chinese market, US suppliers lose that feedback loop at the same time that political uncertainty makes them look like an unreliable long term partner, pushing Chinese customers to actively seek out alternatives rather than simply tolerate the restriction.
That dynamic, Forbes suggests, is precisely what accelerates the self-sufficiency drive the controls were meant to blunt. US dominance in chips had carried real brand prestige inside China as well as globally, and forcing Chinese firms to route around American suppliers gives domestic players like Hua Hong and SMIC both the market opening and the political cover to scale up faster than they might have otherwise.
None of this means the export controls have failed on their own narrow terms of restricting China's access to the most advanced chips. But the profit swings at Hua Hong and SMIC are an early data point for a policy debate that, per Forbes, has mostly been argued in terms of sales lost rather than the longer term shift in who China's chip industry ends up depending on.