> Texas Instruments entered China in 1986 and set up R&D centers and product line teams in Shanghai, Shenzhen and Beijing. The company also established a manufacturing base in Chengdu and two product distribution centers in the country.
Chips are cheap, lightweight, and often made outside the US. They're pretty trivial to divert.
The nominal ‘manufacturers’ of the chips (TI) are forbidden from doing business with Iran.
They’re so far from what happens on the ground though, who actually ends up with one of the chips in their hand has pretty much nothing to do with them.
This is a straw man argument. It is irrelevant where the parts are made. American companies sold them. Their logos are on the them. If Russians can get these parts anywhere, then let them get them elsewhere. American companies don't need to be accessories to killing Ukrainians.
First, we don't know that. It's not uncommon for Chinese manufacturers to make extra parts and sell them themselves. It's also not impossible that Iran or Russia obtained these from taking apart other devices, theft, or other means.
Even if these chips generated revenue for TI, TI almost certainly didn't sell them to Iranian or Russian companies or representatives. They'll have been sold to an intermediary in a legal fashion, as far as TI was aware (or at the very least, with plausible deniability) at the time.
> First, we don't know that. It's not uncommon for Chinese manufacturers to make extra parts and sell them themselves.
You're saying these parts could be designer imposters, like a Gucci purse. Chinese manufactures might copy the part. They wouldn't copy the logos because there is no reason to copy the logos.
> It's also not impossible that Iran or Russia obtained these from taking apart other devices, theft, or other means.
I need you to prepare yourself to be wrong, because this is just as unlikely. Russia doesn't think they're bad, so they're not going to try to make America look bad by associating with them. From Russia's point of view, that would be trying to make America look good, which they would never do.
> Even if these chips generated revenue for TI, TI almost certainly didn't sell them to Iranian or Russian companies or representatives. They'll have been sold to an intermediary in a legal fashion, as far as TI was aware (or at the very least, with plausible deniability) at the time.
If you sold ovens to an intermediary in 1941, and they sold them to a contractor who installed your ovens at Auschwitz, you'd really feel good about the money you made? Trust me, you wouldn't. It would make you sick, as it should if you are a member of our species.
> Russia doesn't think they're bad, so they're not going to try to make America look bad by associating with them.
That wouldn't be the motivation. Russia is desperate for chips. They'll use any they can get their hands on.
> If you sold ovens to an intermediary in 1941, and they sold them to a contractor who installed your ovens at Auschwitz, you'd really feel good about the money you made?
If I had zero reason to believe they'd make their way to Germany when I sold them to someone in town, I'd be sad, but I certainly wouldn't feel culpable.
In the case of Ukraine, pretty hefty sums of my taxes paid are being used to support them. I feel pretty OK with the balance of things there. Some thousands of dollars of microchips to Iran (unwillingly) versus tens of billions in weaponry and supplies to Ukraine (happily) maths out just fine.
Okay, how ? Manufacturer sells the parts to distributors. They can't just opt to not sell their parts to essentially entirety of china (via distributors located there).
And even if they somehow exclude those, who stops someone in any other country from just setting up shell company and reexporting the chips ?
https://pandaily.com/american-semiconductor-maker-texas-inst...
> Texas Instruments entered China in 1986 and set up R&D centers and product line teams in Shanghai, Shenzhen and Beijing. The company also established a manufacturing base in Chengdu and two product distribution centers in the country.
Chips are cheap, lightweight, and often made outside the US. They're pretty trivial to divert.