Chip giant tells Uncle Sam someone could be making orders on the sly

TSMC has reportedly tipped off US officials to a potential attempt by Huawei to circumvent export controls and obtain AI chips manufactured by the Taiwanese company.

The world's largest semiconductor contract manufacturer sounded the alarm after a customer made orders for a chip resembling Huawei's Ascend 910B, a processor outfitted for training large language models, according to the Financial Times.

This follows a report in The Information that the Department of Commerce was probing whether TSMC has been supplying AI or smartphone chips to Huawei in contravention of US export controls.

However, TSMC said in a statement: "We proactively communicated with the US Commerce Department regarding the matter in the report. We are not aware of TSMC being the subject of any investigation at this time."

The US government has increasingly clamped down on the shipping of advanced AI chips to Chinese companies over the past few years ...