One might have expected the offshoring of chipmaking to have reduced the U.S. government’s ability to restrict access to advanced chip fabrication. It would certainly have been easier to cut off Huawei if all the world’s advanced chipmaking was still based on U.S. soil. However, the U.S. still had cards to play. For example, the process of offshoring chip fabrication had coincided with a growing monopolization of chip industry choke points. Nearly every chip in the world uses software from at least one of three U.S.-based companies, Cadence, Synopsys, and Mentor
