“China’s top nuclear weapons research institute, CAEP, bypassed US export restrictions and bought semiconductors”

China’s top nuclear weapons research institute has circumvented US export restrictions and has been buying innovative US semiconductors for the past few years, The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday (local time).

According to the WSJ, the China Institute of Process Physics (CAEP) has bought semiconductors from US companies such as Intel and Nvidia at least 12 times since 2020, despite being designated as a target on an export blacklist the United States since 1997. CAEP, located in Sichuan province in western China, was founded in 1958 and has been conducting research in computer science, electrical engineering and other fields. The organization also hired some of China’s top nuclear weapons researchers to help develop China’s first hydrogen bomb.

CAEP is known to have purchased American semiconductor chips widely used in data centers and personal computers (PCs) through resellers in China. Many of the semiconductors were used for computational fluid dynamics research required for modeling nuclear explosions. A review of research papers published by CAEP mentions the use of US semiconductors in at least 34 studies conducted over the past 10 years. Nuclear experts said at least seven of these studies related to the maintenance of a nuclear arsenal.

The US-made chips acquired by CAEP are high-performance products ranging in size from 7nm (nanometer) to 14nm, which are difficult to mass-produce in China. Among them, Intel’s ‘Xeon Gold’ and Nvidia’s ‘GeForceRTX’ were found to be readily available on Taobao, one of China’s largest e-commerce companies. This is in violation of the US administration’s export control measures that prevent the use of US-made products in foreign nuclear weapons research.

The incident highlights the challenges faced by the Joe Biden administration’s aggressive efforts to prevent China from using American technology, the WSJ said. In October last year, the United States expanded export controls to prevent China from obtaining cutting-edge chip-making equipment for artificial intelligence and supercomputers, which are increasingly important in modern warfare. In 2021, more than a third of the world’s semiconductor chip sales of $556 billion (about 683 trillion won) were found to be purchased from China.