The Biden administration has announced further measures preventing the sale of advanced semiconductor technology to China, including Nvidia’s AI chips.
The US Department of Commerce is taking further steps to limit exports of advanced silicon chip technology to China.
The new rules will go into effect in 30 days. They blacklist Chinese chip designers Moore Threads and Biren, and restrict the sale of a large range of advanced semiconductor technologies to 21 countries, including Iran and Russia, over fears the equipment could be diverted to China and other national security concerns.
According to commerce department secretary Gina Raimondo, the rules aim to limit China’s access to “advanced semiconductors that could fuel breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and sophisticated computers that are critical to [Chinese] military applications”.
The new measures are also address the loopholes created by the rules set in 2022, which banned the sale of the Nvidia H100. However, they did not account for Chinese firms being able to buy a slightly slowed-down version called the H800 or A800.
In contrast, the new restrictions will block sales of the A800 and H800 chips, Nvidia confirmed. Although China accounts for up to 25 per cent of the company’s revenues from data centre chip sales, Nvidia stated it does not expect the rules to provoke a meaningful hit to near-term results.
A spokesperson for the Chinese embassy said the country ”firmly opposes” the new restrictions. It said the country believes “arbitrarily placing curbs or forcibly seeking decoupling to serve [a] political agenda violates the principles of market economy and fair competition [and] undermines the international economic and trading order”.
The Semiconductor Industry Association said the new measures are “overly broad” and “risk harming the US semiconductor ecosystem without advancing national security as they encourage overseas customers to look elsewhere”.
The US has restricted China’s access to semiconductor technology since at least 2019 when the Trump administration banned Huawei from buying vital US technology. Last October, the Biden administration imposed sweeping export controls on American chipmaking tools to China.
Last year, China began a trade dispute at the World Trade Organization against the US’s chip export control measures, saying the curbs “threaten the stability of the global industrial supply chains”. In May, China made its first major move in the trade war with Washington by telling its operators not to use Micron chips in certain infrastructure projects because of national security concerns.
In the UK, the government has been accused of putting the its own semiconductor industry at risk with the continuing delay in publishing a strategy to ensure the security of its supply chains for chips.
