Maintaining the status quo would let U.S. officials figure out how to spur America's tech industry. Congress recently passed national-security legislation to give chip companies grants and financial incentives, which lawmakers indicated could be as much as $3 billion per project. Biden advisers have signaled they intend to continue a Trump administration effort to spur U.S. companies to develop open-source 5G equipment technology that could compete against Huawei. And the president-elect himself made encouraging U.S. manufacturing of electric vehicles -- a supply chain that China currently dominates -- a central plank of his platform.
"The U.S. priority is to increase domestic semiconductor manufacturing so that it's less reliant on potentially volatile sites in Asia," says Dan Wang, a Beijing-based tech analyst at Gavekal Dragonomics. "Meanwhile, China has to rebuild substantial portions of the semiconductor software and equipment supply chain."
--Stu Woo
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
01-16-21 1214ET
