U.S. Lawmakers Urge Stricter AI Chip Export Restrictions on China
SAN FRANCISCO – In a recent move, two U.S. lawmakers leading a committee focused on China have called upon the Biden administration to tighten export restrictions on artificial intelligence chips. The request comes in response to industry lobbying efforts aimed at keeping the existing rules unchanged.
Representative Mike Gallagher, chair of the House of Representatives select committee on China, and Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi, ranking member of the committee, have written a letter to Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, urging her to “further strengthen” the comprehensive set of export control rules that were implemented last October. These rules were designed to restrict China’s access to leading AI chips produced by U.S. firms, including Nvidia, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), and Intel.
The lawmakers are calling for a more stringent approach than the one previously considered by U.S. officials, which focused on imposing restrictions solely based on processing speeds. Under the current rules, two performance caps are imposed on exporting AI chips to China: one concerning the chips’ interconnect speeds and the other regarding their processing speeds.
Despite the rules being in effect, Nvidia managed to develop special chips for China with reduced interconnect speeds, while Intel also unveiled an AI chip tailored for the Chinese market. However, Nvidia’s chips still possess sufficiently high processing speeds, making them suitable for creating advanced AI systems. As a result, the U.S. export controls have had limited success in slowing down China’s AI sector, as reported by Reuters in May.
The potential for stricter rules has prompted intense lobbying efforts, with the chief executives of Nvidia, Intel, and Qualcomm visiting Washington to discuss China policy with administration officials. Concurrently, the Semiconductor Industry Association has also advocated for continued access to the Chinese market for U.S. semiconductor companies.
In their letter, Gallagher and Krishnamoorthi proposed maintaining the existing speed limit on AI chips’ interconnect speeds and advocated for lowering it further to prevent circumvention of the regulations through clever engineering. Additionally, they called on administration officials to carefully consider cutting off Chinese firms’ access to advanced computing chips in the cloud, where major U.S. firms like Amazon.com, Microsoft, and Alphabet’s Google offer these chips as part of their cloud computing services.
The lawmakers emphasized the importance of strengthening the October 7, 2022, rules to ensure that advanced U.S. technology and expertise related to advanced computing and semiconductors are not misused against the United States.