Biden Administration Clamps Down on China’s Access to Chip Technology
The Chinese government has invested heavily in building up its semiconductor industry, but it still lags behind the United States, Taiwan and South Korea in its ability to produce the most advanced chips. In other fields, like artificial intelligence, China is no longer significantly behind the United States, but those technologies mostly rely on advanced chips that are designed or fabricated by non-Chinese firms.
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Jack Dongarra, a computer scientist at the University of Tennessee, said that some of China’s most advanced supercomputers depend on chips made by California-based Intel or Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, which uses U.S. technology in its production process and so would be subject to the new rules.
In a briefing with reporters, senior administration officials said the measures would be limited to the most advanced chips, and thus would not have a broad commercial impact on private Chinese businesses. But they conceded that they could become more restrictive over time, given that technology will begin to outpace them.
Industry executives say that many Chinese industries that rely on artificial intelligence and advanced algorithms power those capabilities with American graphic processing units, which will now be restricted. Those include companies working with technologies like autonomous driving and gene sequencing, as well as the artificial intelligence company SenseTime and ByteDance, the Chinese internet company that owns TikTok.
New limits on sales of chip-making equipment are also expected to clamp down on the operations of China’s homegrown chip makers, including Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp., Yangtze Memory Technologies Co. and ChangXin Memory Technologies.
It will take time for experts to assess the complex regulation, and several cautioned that its impact would hinge on how the policy is implemented. For most of the measures, the Commerce Department has the discretion to grant companies special licenses to continue selling the restricted products to China, though it said that most would be denied.
Some Republican lawmakers and China hawks have criticized the department for being too willing to issue such licenses, allowing U.S. companies to continue selling sensitive technology to China even when national security may be at stake.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/07/business/economy/biden-chip-technology.html