SINGAPORE -- Nikkei Asia has won a gold prize at the World Association of News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) Asian Media Awards for a feature series examining the growing technological divide between the U.S. and China.
The results were announced on Monday in Singapore, with Nikkei Asia taking its award for a series of stories on how the American and Chinese tech sectors are pulling away from each other.
As the U.S. and China intensify efforts to reduce their dependence on each other, Nikkei Asia's exclusive reporting revealed efforts in both countries to localize technology production and reshape supply chains.
The series opens with an in-depth examination of the supply chain for chip production equipment titled "Can China build its own ASML?" Nikkei Asia's reporting team spent nearly a year interviewing more than a dozen industry experts and sources.
As the U.S. tightened restrictions on exports of semiconductor manufacturing equipment and other technologies to China, the team reported extensively on Beijing's push to develop domestic alternatives to some of the world's leading chipmaking tools.
The reporting also highlighted the challenges China still faces in developing its own advanced lithography equipment.
The second story, "Inside the U.S. chip revolution unfolding in Arizona," took readers to the front lines of America's massive reshoring push, particularly in Arizona, and examined Washington's drive to revive its domestic semiconductor industry.
The reporting underscored the challenge of rebuilding the industry following decades of offshoring, as well as the indispensable role Asian companies are playing in America's manufacturing revival. It also showed that even as the U.S. and China seek to reduce their dependence on each other, their technology supply chains remain deeply interconnected.
The third story, "China aims for 5-fold increase in advanced chip output to meet AI demand," tracked China's efforts to boost advanced chip production capacity to meet rapidly growing domestic demand for AI.
Nikkei Asia was the first to reveal that Huawei, leading Chinese chipmakers Semiconductor Manufacturing International Co. (SMIC) and Hua Hong Group were moving toward producing cutting-edge 7-nanometer and even 5-nm performance-level chips.
The series was led by Cheng Ting-Fang, Lauly Li, Cissy Zhou, Shunsuke Tabeta, Katherine Creel and Yifan Yu, and combined visual storytelling -- including video and photos -- with detailed industry data.
