US to Introduce New Restrictions on China’s Access to Cutting-Edge Chips

The Biden administration is expected to announce a sweeping set of measures on Monday designed to further restrain China’s ability to develop advanced artificial intelligence, people familiar with the matter told WIRED. The controls could include sanctioning dozens of Chinese companies that produce equipment for making semiconductors, as well as placing restrictions on a handful of chip manufacturing plants, some of which have ties to the Chinese tech giant Huawei.

The US Department of Commerce has also discussed including controls on the sale of high-bandwidth memory, or HBM, an advanced kind of 3D-stacked computer memory component that is often used in high-performance GPUs and customized AI chips. Bloomberg previously reported that the Biden administration was considering clamping down on China’s access to HBM chips.

In total, the Biden administration could end up adding around 200 Chinese firms to an entity list maintained by the Bureau of Industry and Security—an agency within the Commerce department—which would require other companies to acquire special licenses to supply them with software or products from the United States. The US government has been discussing the new measures with its allies and representatives from the semiconductor industry for months, and the exact details of what will be announced on Monday were still in flux as of earlier this week.

A spokesperson for the Commerce department declined to comment. Huawei did not immediately return a request for comment.

Reuters reported on Friday that the US Chamber of Commerce, a powerful advocacy group for American businesses, warned its members in an email last week that a new round of export controls targeting China would be arriving “prior to the Thanksgiving break,” though that timing now appears to have been pushed back by a few days.

“China is firmly opposed to the US overstretching the concept of national security, abusing export control measures and making malicious attempts to block and suppress China,” Mao Ning, a spokesperson for China’s foreign ministry, said at a regularly scheduled press conference earlier this week in response to the anticipated controls.

The limits on China’s access to the high-bandwidth memory seem aimed at slowing the country’s efforts to develop domestic chips capable of training very large and powerful AI models. The new restrictions are expected to block access to HMB3, one of the people told WIRED, the latest and most advanced version of the technology, and impose some limits on access to the previous generation, known as HMB2.

Original Author: Will Knight, Louise Matsakis | Source: Wired