Paul Triolo on Chinese labs makings chips, SMIC, Huawei and the importance of AI governance

In this episode, I speak with Paul Triolo, partner at DGA-Albright Stonebridge Group, about how to think clearly about China’s semiconductor ecosystem, Huawei’s role in the domestic AI stack, and whether U.S. export controls are actually working as intended. We start with the latest debate around restricting foreign access to advanced Chinese AI models, before moving into the semiconductor stack itself: SMIC’s role, capacity bottlenecks, domestic GPU startups, hyperscaler chip efforts, Huawei’s vertical integration, and why software ecosystems like CUDA, CANN, and MindSpore matter just as much as hardware. Paul argues that the usual framing- whether China can “catch up” to Nvidia or TSMC is simply too narrow. The more important story is that export controls have pushed China toward a broader systems-engineering response across chips, tools, packaging, memory, software, and cloud deployment. We also discuss HBM, rare earths, remote-access loopholes, the logic behind Huawei’s roadmap, and why the collateral effects of controls may be larger than policymakers expected. We close on the bigger strategic question: whether the U.S. and China are drifting into an AI race dynamic that raises risks for everyone, and why more direct dialogue — not just more restrictions — may matter most from here. [Paul co-authored a piece here discussing how to navigate the complexities of the U.S.-China AI safety dialog] This is an extremely insight-dense episode, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. Thanks again Paul Triolo.#WAIC