They’re beginning to bite in the People’s Republic of China, according to “people familiar.”

Shortages of advanced semiconductors are so acute that the government has begun intervening in how the output of China’s largest contract chip maker, Semiconductor Manufacturing International, is distributed, according to people familiar with the matter. Chinese authorities are trying to give priority to the needs of tech conglomerate and national champion Huawei Technologies, which uses SMIC technology to make artificial-intelligence chips, the people said.

Say the report is accurate, the mythical nature of the source notwithstanding. What is the PRC doing about it besides allocating domestic production from the center?

Up against restrictions, some semiconductor companies such as Shanghai-based MetaX are designing chips on older, more available technology, bundling two or more smaller chips together to compensate for more limited computing power. Bundling strategies at Chinese companies have resulted in electricity-guzzling data centers, prompting multiple local governments to start subsidizing their power bills, people familiar with the matter said.

And they smuggle American chips that have been banned from export to the PRC. The PRC also will solve its data center energy problem.

The correct answer to this, though, is not to remove the export restrictions. The correct answer is to do our own workarounds of this type, learn the details of the PRC’s workarounds, and learn how the PRC solves its own data center energy shortage problems at the same time we work out solutions to our own data center energy shortage problems. Doing that would better prepare us for future such shortages, and it would enable us to better target restrictions on American goods, not just chips, headed for the PRC, whether directly or via third (and fourth) party nations.