Chinese fabless chip maker Xiamen Sophgo and bitcoin mining equipment supplier Bitmain have denied any business relationship with Huawei Technologies after being accused of having asked Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) to produce Ascend 910B chips.
TSMC has suspended shipments to Sophgo after an Ascend 910B processor, an artificial intelligence (AI) chip developed by HiSilicon, was found on a Huawei AI accelerator, Reuters reported on October 27, citing two unnamed people familiar with the matter.
The report came after TechInsights, a Canada-based information platform for the chip industry, said in a report on October 9 that it found the Ascend 910B on a Huawei Atlas 300T A2 AI training card. The Information reported on October 18 that the US Commerce Department has started an investigation into whether TSMC is directly or indirectly supplying Huawei with smartphone and AI chips.
“The investigation of the US Commerce Department on possible TSMC-and-Huawei link is not related to Sophgo and its product. Sophgo has never engaged in any direct or indirect business relationship with Huawei,” Sophgo said in a statement on October 27.
“Sophgo has been conducting business in strict compliance with applicable laws and regulations, including but not limited to all the applicable US national export control laws and regulations, and has never been in violation of any of such laws and regulations,” it said.
It added that it has provided a detailed investigation report to TSMC to prove that it is not related to the Huawei investigation.
Luring Taiwanese chip engineers
Sophgo was founded in April 2019 by Micree Zhan, a co-founder of Bitmain. According to its website, Sophgo focuses on the research and development (R&D), promotion and application of computing power products such as RISC-V processors and tensor processing units (TPUs).
RISC-V is an open-source instruction set architecture (ISA) that provides a foundation for processor design. A TPU is a custom-designed application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) that accelerates machine learning workloads.
The company said it has R&D centers in more than 10 Chinese cities, including Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Qingdao, as well as in the United States, Singapore and other countries. It said more than 73% of its employees are R&D personnel while 78% of them have master’s and doctoral degrees.
Sophgo’s senior executives include Chairman Zhan, President Chen Weiyu and Chief Executive Zhao Hong’ai.
According to company search website Tianyancha.com, Zhan holds a 22% stake in Sophgo. Xiamen Qiayi Technology, controlled by Sophgo’s senior executives led by Zhao, owns a 33.1% stake in Sophgo.
Public information shows that Zhao finished a master degree course at Peking University’s School of Integrated Circuits and has 10-years of experience in product planning, R&D management, sales and marketing.
Zhao founded Sophon in 2016 and Cvitek in 2019, both of which are Beijing-based chip design firms that later merged into Sophgo. She is now a legal representative of Sophgo.
In a panel discussion organized by China Computer Federation in June 2022, she was among 21 guest speakers who shared their views about the Chinese Communist Party’s achievements in empowering women in the computing industry.
On Monday, Bitmain said in a statement that it specializes in designing cryptocurrency mining rigs and is not involved in or related to the supply chain investigation as reported by the media recently.
”Any news alleging that Bitmain is involved in the aforementioned event is false and baseless,” it said. “Bitmain reserves the right to take legal action” against any media outlet that “publishes and disseminates false information.”
Zhan’s ’Huawei dream’
In March 2021, IC Link Limited and WiseCore Technology, two units of Bitmain, were fined in Taiwan for violating the island’s Cross-Strait Act as they used high salaries to lure Taiwanese chip engineers to work in the mainland without government’s approval.
Richard Hu Weixing, dean of Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Macau, said in an article in August 2024 that some mainland firms had used TSMC’s chip manufacturing services and ASE Holdings’ chip assembly and test services via IC Link Limited and WiseCore Technology.
TMTPost, a news website in mainland China, said in an article on Monday that a unit of Bitmain formed a partnership with Huawei in 2018 to provide the latter’s smartphone users with bitcoin wallet services.
The report said that, when Sophgo was established in 2019, Zhan hired former Huawei employee Li Qi as the company’s legal representative and director. But Li left Sophgo in 2021.
However, the TMTPost article was removed from the Internet in China on Monday afternoon. It is still being circulated on overseas websites.
An article published by Odaily.com, a unit of Beijing-based news website 36Kr, in 2020 said that Zhan had had a “Huawei dream” in 2018 to 2019 as he insisted that Bitmain use Huawei’s product development team (PDT), integrated product development (IPD) and human resource systems. Zhan’s drive to “replicate Huawei” ended in 2020 after co-founder Wu Jihan intervened, the article said.
Read: Huawei uses TSMC loophole to bypass US chip ban
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