217: Chapter 218 Customs Transactions Completely Stagnant! The "Abnormal Zeroing" That Gone Mad for the U.S. Department of Commerce

It was late June in Washington, and the air was muggy. The U.S. Department of Commerce, Office of Data Analysis and Strategic Security Audit.

Senior auditor David stared intently at the three massive high-resolution data screens in front of him. A fine layer of cold sweat beaded on his forehead.

He nervously tapped the refresh key five times in a row. The "click" sounds from the keyboard seemed exceptionally jarring in the deathly quiet office area.

"Did the customs underlying data pool crash? Or was the Wall Street port cut off by hackers?"

Gritting his teeth, David grabbed the red internal dedicated line on his desk and dialed the director's office directly.

Less than a minute later, Director Carl pushed open the glass door and strode quickly to David's workstation.

"David, you had better give me a reasonable excuse for interrupting my interdepartmental meeting." Carl lowered his voice, his tone filled with extreme displeasure.

"Sir, see for yourself." David didn't waste any words, pointing with a trembling finger at the main screen in the middle: "This is the global semiconductor import and export customs clearance physical flow for the first half of the year, just finished running."

Carl frowned and cast his gaze toward the screen. After just two glances, this old politician, who had been struggling in the Department of Commerce for twenty years, saw his pupils contract to the extreme.

"Zero?!" Carl slammed his hands onto the back of David's chair, his voice uncontrollably rising by an octave: "The semiconductor foundry order from China, which reached one billion U.S. dollars and had been sand-table simulated, why is the actual received flow all zero?!"

"It's not just the foundry orders that have zeroed out." David's hands flew across the keyboard, bringing up several other sets of charts: "Sir, this isn't a slow decline caused by market fluctuations, but an absolute vacuum like a cliff-edge drop! For a full six months, the entire Chinese semiconductor industry hasn't imported a single high-end chip from the international market!"

David pulled up the last red-line chart: "Even at the beginning of the year, they were still purchasing basic silicon wafers in large quantities. But in these last two months of the mid-year, even the most basic wafer import records have gone completely silent."

Looking at the glaring "0"s all over the screen, Carl gasped. From the data, it seemed as if the semiconductor industry of the entire Eastern great power had been completely drained of blood overnight, falling into an eternal death and slumber.

"Have all their electronic foundries disbanded on the spot?!" Carl straightened up abruptly, a sense of extremely dangerous abnormality rushing to his head. He absolutely did not believe that the terrifying world factory would suddenly go into collective shock.

"David!" Carl grabbed the unauthorized-access communicator on the desk, a flash of horror in his eyes: "Immediately connect across departments with the General Administration of Customs and the International Trade Commission! Get me all the export data for China's electrical appliances, high-precision equipment, and any terminal products containing chips from the last six months!"

Ten minutes later, the underlying data packets from the General Administration of Customs and the International Trade Commission slammed directly into David's terminal screen. Carl braced his hands on the desk, staring fixedly at the red export curve that was soaring all the way up, his scalp tingling.

There was no stagnation at all! All of China's exports of home appliances, smart terminals, and even high-end industrial numerical control equipment not only did not suffer from shock or supply cuts due to the "chip shortage," but the export volume was actually soaring at a terrifying speed!

"Since they haven't imported a single chip from the international market, then what the hell kind of stuff is packed inside the bellies of these exported machines?!"

This abnormal paradox, like a bombshell, instantly smashed through the ceiling of the U.S. Department of Commerce and directly shook the high-level officials of the State Department.

That afternoon, a top-level emergency directive was secretly issued from Washington, reaching American intelligence stations around the world: "Buy them! Buy up all terminal products containing chips newly exported by China in the last three months. Spare no cost, sweep them up frantically in the global market, and use military aircraft to send them back to headquarters immediately!"

Forty-eight hours later, in Virginia, at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's top-secret microelectronics laboratory. Accompanied by the jarring sound of a power saw, a piece of China's latest high-precision equipment, just intercepted from European customs, was being forcibly and violently dismantled.

Chief Technical Advisor Harris wore anti-static gloves. Using tweezers, he carefully peeled a black encapsulated chip with no English markings from the motherboard.

"The volume is more than twice as large as the mainstream chips currently on the market." Harris stared at the black block on the tweezers, his brows furrowed, a trace of confusion flashing in his eyes: "This packaging process... is just like a backward product from the last century."

With this doubt, he inserted the chip into the top-tier deep ultraviolet test bench. "Power it on, run the underlying data." Harris stepped back half a step and pressed the start button.

However, the moment the test screen lit up and the various physical parameters began to refresh frantically like a waterfall, the expression on Harris's face, which had been relatively calm, instantly froze completely.

The few top Silicon Valley technical experts gathered around the test bench also looked as if they had seen a ghost in broad daylight. They lunged at the screen, staring intently at the data indicators that completely defied common sense.

"This is impossible..." one expert exclaimed, his voice trembling: "At the same computing power, its power consumption is only one-third of the mainstream top-tier chips on the market?!"

"It's not just the low power consumption! Its peak main frequency performance directly crushes our current latest-process processing cores!"

The huge, top-secret laboratory instantly fell into a deathly silence. Everyone stared at the test instrument with off-the-charts data, their minds blank.

This seemingly clumsy black chip was using an unreasonable, dimensionality-reduction parameter to rub their pride-and-joy semiconductor common sense into the ground!

"Put it into the high-resolution electron scanning microscope!" Harris almost roared this sentence. He shoved the assistant standing in front of him aside and personally operated the robotic arm, sending the bare die, stripped of its outer packaging, into the vacuum chamber of the microscope.

"Magnify... magnify again!" As the magnification climbed, the originally blurry microscopic structure on the screen began to gradually become clear. Lines of circuit engravings, completely different from traditional photolithography processes, were clearly displayed before all the experts like precise micro-carved totems.

There was none of the characteristic halo marks left by the extreme ultraviolet etching that traditional Lithography Machines rely on. The edges of these circuits were cold, hard, and sharp, exuding a sense of almost terrifying absolute precision.

"This underlying wiring logic without mask interference..." Harris's eyes were glued to the screen, his pupils trembling violently.

Suddenly, his gaze locked firmly onto a set of extremely special "directional ripple" arrays in the chip's core computing unit. That was the "technical fingerprint" written into the hardware's underlying layer, absolutely impossible to conceal.

"My God..." Harris stumbled back two steps. It was as if he had been struck in the chest by a heavy hammer, crashing into the workbench behind him, his cold sweat instantly soaking through his protective suit.