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’m so sorry. That must be awful.
I’m a little shocked to hear this from a Latvian, as you guys got fucked up pretty hard by Operations Redskin and Meteor. Feels like an Italian pining for the days of Eisenhower’s GLADIO or a Cambodian saying how much they missed the foreign policy of Richard Nixon.
I’m not sure what additional pressure would look like. Part of the problem with trying to amp up pressure on Putin is that you do that by applying pressure to his allies. And if they break towards Putin because you showed up with too many sticks and not enough carrots, they’re that much less likely to side with you again in the future.
Estonia, Sweden and Finland have been getting a ton of carrots relative to Poland, Hungary, and Turkey. The Saudis know they are too critical to seriously threaten. The Israelis know they’ve got the Americans by the balls, so they can do whatever the fuck they like. Meanwhile, the BRICS (-R) - who never really had a dog in the fight to begin with - are finding fewer and fewer reasons to work with increasingly stingy and racist American diplomats.
Which direction do you really think South Africa would go if given an ultimatum? What about India, a country far more reliant on Russian gas imports than American exports? We already pissed off Brazil by playing footsy with Bolsonaro for four interminable years.
And when the international community sees Biden as a dead man walking into the next election, there’s far less confidence that he’ll be there to fulfill any kind of threat or promise relative to Putin or Xi, who aren’t going anywhere.