TSMC Cuts Off Singapore Company Amidst Huawei Fallout

Taiwanese contract chipmaking giant TSMC has reportedly severed ties with a Singapore-based company named PowerAIR following a client review, after a chip TSMC produced was found in a processor made by US-sanctioned Huawei Technologies.

PowerAIR is the second company with which TSMC is known to have cut off relations following the incident.

The move resulted from a client check that was in turn triggered by the discovery by Canadian research firm TechInsights of a TSMC part in the multi-chip Ascend Ascend 910B AI accelerator, The South China Morning Post reported, citing unnamed sources.

The newspaper said it was unable to contact PowerAIR, which has no official website, nor any publicly listed phone number or email address.

Sanctions

In October TSMC informed the US that one of its parts had been found in the Ascend 910B, following the TechInsights study.

Shortly afterward TSMC stopped supplying a customer identified as mainland Chinese chip company Sophgo.

The US later added Sophgo to a trade blacklist and ordered TSMC to stop shipping AI chips using advanced manufacturing processes to customers in mainland China.

TSMC said it has not supplied Huawei with chips since 2020, when US restrictions prevented it from doing so, and Huawei said it has not ordered any chips from the Taiwanese firm since the sanctions took effect.

Sophgo and its affiliate, cryptocurrency mining equipment supplier Bitmain, have denied any business relationship with Huawei.

China comeback

Huawei has made a comeback in China with new high-end smartphones running domestically produced 5G and central processing chips manufactured by China’s SMIC, which is also under US sanctions.

Huawei also introduced a mobile operating system called HarmonyOS Next last year that competes with Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS and runs a range of widely used Chinese apps, including China’s TikTok equivalent Douyin, Ant Group’s Alipay and Tencent’s super-app WeChat.