The computer is powered by tiny chips designed by a Chinese firm called Phytium Technology using American software and built in the world’s most advanced chip factory in Taiwan, which hums with American precision machinery, say the analysts.

Phytium portrays itself as a commercial company aspiring to become a global chip giant like Intel. It does not publicize its connections to the research arms of the People’s Liberation Army.

The hypersonic test facility is located at the China Aerodynamics Research and Development Center (CARDC), which also obscures its military connections though it is run by a PLA major general, according to public documents, and the former officials and analysts, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter.

Phytium’s partnership with CARDC offers a prime example of how China is quietly harnessing civilian technologies for strategic military purposes — with the help of American technology. The trade is not illegal but is a vital link in a global high-tech supply chain that is difficult to regulate because the same computer chips that could be used for a commercial data center can power a military supercomputer.

Hypersonics refers to a range of emerging technologies that can propel missiles at greater than five times the speed of sound and potentially evade current defenses.

The Trump administration was set to place Phytium and a handful of other Chinese companies on an export blacklist late last year, but ran out of time, according to former U.S. officials. Such a listing would block technology of American origin from flowing to those firms. And, experts say, it would slow the advance of China’s hypersonic weapons program, as well as other sophisticated weapons and more powerful surveillance capabilities.

The designation package now awaits Commerce Department action.

Phytium did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

American firms generally argue that export controls hurt their profits while encouraging China to send its business elsewhere and develop its own industries. But analysts note the United States’ policy is that American technology should not aid the Chinese military and that curtailing future progress by the PLA is worth the cost in lost business.

The Phytium case also spotlights the dilemma for Taiwan, a self-ruled liberal democracy perched strategically between the United States and China. Taiwan relies on Washington for defense against invasion by Beijing, which U.S. officials say is a growing risk. But Taiwan’s companies rely on the Chinese market, which accounts for 35 percent of Taiwan’s trade.

As tensions between China and the United States deepen, so too have questions over the proper limits for American and Taiwanese firms doing business with China.

Reaching the target in minutes

Semiconductors are the brains of modern electronics, enabling advances in everything from clean energy to quantum computing. They are now China’s top import, valued at more than $300 billion a year, and a major priority in China’s latest Five-Year Plan for national development.

In January 2019, Chinese President Xi Jinping visited Tianjin, 70 miles from Beijing and home to Phytium, and touted the company’s importance to the country’s “indigenous innovation” effort. Today, Phytium boasts it is “a leading independent core chip provider in China.” The company markets microprocessors for servers and video games, but its shareholders and main clients are the Chinese state and military, according to government records.

Phytium was founded in August 2014, according to business registration records in a public government database. It was created as a joint venture of the state-owned conglomerate China Electronic Corp. (CEC), the National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin, and the Tianjin municipal government, according to the records.

The national supercomputing center is a lab run by the National University of Defense Technology (NUDT), a premier military research institution whose current president and immediate past president were PLA generals.

In 2015, the Commerce Department placed both organizations on its trade blacklist list, for involvement in nuclear weapons activity, a designation that bars U.S. exports to the firms unless a waiver is obtained.

Phytium’s ownership has changed hands over the years, but its shareholders often have links to the PLA, records show.

“Phytium acts like an independent commercial company,” said Eric Lee, a research associate at the Project 2049 Institute, a Northern Virginia think tank focused on strategic Indo-Pacific issues. “Its executives wear civilian clothes, but they are mostly former military officers from NUDT.’’

In China’s rugged hinterland lies Mianyang, a city in southwest Sichuan province that is a center for research in nuclear weapons. It is also home to the country’s largest aerodynamics research complex: CARDC.

CARDC, which says it has 18 wind tunnels, is heavily involved in research on hypersonic weapons, according to former U.S. officials and U.S. and Australian researchers. Its director, Fan Zhaolin, is a major general, but he is pictured in civilian clothes on the center’s website.

The center has been on the U.S. trade blacklist — called the “entity list”— since 1999 for contributing to “the proliferation of missiles.” In 2016 Commerce further tightened restrictions on the facility.

CARDC, said Tai Ming Cheung, director of the University of California San Diego’s Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, is “a beating heart of Chinese hypersonic research and development.”

The research center and Fan did not respond to emails seeking comment.

China’s major investments in hypersonics is a major concern at the Pentagon.

“The only way to reliably see a hypersonic vehicle is from space, which makes it a challenge,” said Mark J. Lewis, until recently the Pentagon’s director of defense research and technology. If it is traveling at hypersonic speeds — going at least a mile per second — it gives a missile defense system very little time to figure out what it is and how to stop it, he said.

Hypersonics is a critical, emerging military technology, said Lewis, the executive director of the National Defense Industrial Association’s Emerging Technologies Institute. China could target Navy ships and air bases in the Pacific, he said, adding that a conventional cruise missile would take an hour or two to reach its target while a hypersonic missile could do so in minutes.

“It is a huge concern,” he said.

A million trillion calculations

In 2014, the U.S. Air Force released an unclassified report on the technology of air warfare that included hypersonics. “Anyone could pick up this document,” Lewis said. “Then we basically took our foot off the gas. There was no sense of hurry, of alacrity.”

Meanwhile, the Chinese read the American research. Their scientists began showing up at U.S. conferences. They started investing. “They saw that hypersonics could give them a military advantage,” Lewis said. “And they acted.”

China, unlike the United States, has fielded a hypersonic weapon: a medium-range hypersonic glide vehicle.

Hundreds to thousands of different configurations of heat, vehicle lift and atmospheric drag need to be analyzed to make a hypersonic missile work, which would be too expensive and time-consuming through physical testing alone, said Iain Boyd, Director of the Center for National Security Initiatives at the University of Colorado, Boulder. “If you didn’t have supercomputers it could take a decade,’’ he said.

In May 2016, CARDC unveiled a “petascale” supercomputer that would aid the aerodynamic design of hypersonic missiles and other aircraft. A petascale computer can handle one trillion calculations per second.

In 2018 and 2019, CARDC scientists published papers showcasing their supercomputer and noting their calculations were done with Phytium’s 1500 and 2000 series chips, though the papers do not discuss research on hypersonic weapons.

CARDC, Phytium, the military university and the Tianjin supercomputing lab are currently developing an even faster computer — able to handle “exascale” speeds of a million trillion calculations per second. The supercomputer, dubbed Tianhe-3, is powered by Phytium’s 2000 series chips, according to Chinese state media.

To produce such chips, Phytium requires the newest design tools.