A new round of sanctions has just been decided by the United States Department of Commerce against the export of AI chips to China.
The United States and China have been waging an increasingly intense trade war for several years now, which is expressed on the American side by restrictions on the export of technological equipment. At the center of this strategy, semiconductors, which are a weak point of the Middle Kingdom, and for which Washington can count on the support of its allies.
And in order to prevent China from finding measures to circumvent the first sanctions, new restrictions will soon be imposed.
Nvidia’s little trick will no longer work
To train its artificial intelligence models, China must, like most other countries in the world, use Nvidia chips, considered the best GPUs in the world in the sector. Despite the sanctions taken a year ago by the United States, Chinese tech giants remained very large customers of Nvidia.
And for good reason, the semiconductor manufacturer had developed a little trick to continue trading. As it was impossible for it to sell its best chips A100 and the H100, it developed similar products, called A800 and H800, whose power was lowered just enough to avoid falling under the bans.
A gap which will be filled by the new measures taken by the American government. In a few weeks, it will be necessary to obtain licenses from the Commerce Department to continue selling the chips essential to the development of AI.
Foreign subsidiaries of Chinese companies also targeted
Suffice to say that the blow could be hard for Beijing. Its national companies are in fact still well behind in the semiconductor sector, the best being only capable of engraving at 7 nm. And especially since the Biden administration’s new measures will not only focus on China.
Because to make the sanctions more effective, they will see their scope increase drastically, since they will affect both all subsidiaries of Chinese companies abroad, but also around forty countries allied to this country. The objective being, obviously, to prevent the implementation of circumvention methods by Beijing. Should we expect future retaliatory measures from China?
Source : Cafetech
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