Sanctions have crippled Baikal’s production and packaging capabilities
Why it matters: Global sanctions against Russian companies have worked in at least one respect: Baikal Electronics can no longer supply enough chips to meet the country’s needs, and half of the chips it produces are defective. Russia is working to build up its domestic capabilities, but it is unclear whether it can catch up.
Baikal Electronics, one of Russia’s major processor developers, has been struggling in the wake of sanctions imposed by the US and UK governments following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Until then, the company ordered the production of chips, including their packaging, from TSMC.
The Taiwan-based chipmaker promptly stopped shipping processors that year because of the sanctions. The sanctions also blocked the Russian company from licensing Arm technology. Baikal, which switched from the Baikal-T series MIPS instruction set architecture to Arm years ago, used the technology in its Baikal-M, -S, and -L series chips.
The supply restrictions forced the company to turn inward to produce packaged and tested silicon. Russian business news outlet Vedomosti recently revealed that about half of the processors packaged in Russia are defective. A source told the paper that the failures are due to equipment that is not configured correctly and not having enough properly trained technicians for the chip packaging.
I don’t think it’s booming by any means, but it’s definitely not collapsing in a way that many assumed.
Perhaps Putin doesn’t give a fuck, perhaps it’s because they have enough reserves to keep things going for x months/years, who knows. I would love to see them lose their reserves and truly start to look at the position they’ve put themselves in. That’s when Putin’s leadership will be questioned at a higher level, and the idea of “one mother state” will be viewed as a disaster.
The masters never cares about the people. Putin still lives the same way he did before in his palace.
Russia will most likely not collapse (as in “total chaos”) as long as China, India, Brasil and other countries support them in their colonization efforts.
But it will bring them down on their knees and it will, if the West somehow is able to deliver ammunition etc, force Russia to end their war in Ukraine.
I’m not optimistic, especially not since the Americans are about to vote for the Russian asset in the upcoming election, but hope is the last thing that leaves you…
Americans aren’t about to vote for the Mango Mussolini. Red
coatshats are.