US puts new restrictions on China’s access to advanced chips

The US government has imposed similar export controls on China that have limited its ability to produce advanced silicon for years, but the controls do not appear to have deterred Huawei. develop competitive chips to train large AI models.

The Chinese tech giant was temporarily crippled by US sanctions half a decade ago, send sample According to the South China Morning Post, their latest AI training chip, called Ascend, will reach customers this September. Companies testing Ascend are said to include ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent company. said he was practicing a large model that primarily uses Ascend. Baidu, China’s leading search engine company and developer of automated driving systems, recently Order Huawei chips according to Reuters, in a shift away from US chip giant Nvidia. (Nvidia declined to comment.)

Export restrictions aimed at limiting China’s AI sector began under the first Trump administration. In 2019, several emerging Chinese AI companies add entity list, which means American companies, including chipmakers like Nvidia, will have to get a special license to do business with them. This was followed by restrictions on the sale of chips made with American technology to Huawei, China’s dominant telecommunications company and leading smartphone maker.

The Biden administration increased controls in October 2022, Restricting exports of advanced GPU chips to Chinaincluding those made by Nvidia, a move aimed at limiting the ability of any Chinese company to train the most powerful AI models. Rules has been tightened a year later to close loopholes that still allow Chinese companies access to some advanced chips.

It can be difficult to gauge the impact of US chip sanctions, and some experts question whether the controls are pushing China to make more rapid progress in chip production. , reducing dependence on American companies or not.

Late 2023, Huawei launched Mate 60a smartphone with an advanced chip from Chinese chipmaker SMIC. The announcement caused a stir in Washington because it showed that SMIC had made significant progress in improving its own manufacturing techniques. (Further analysis indicates that Huawei and SMIC are still dependent foreign supplier.)

But one report published This week, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank based in Washington, D.C., argued that the Chinese government had begun increasing investment in domestic chip manufacturing before the government The United States began to control its access to advanced semiconductors. It also noted that China has made greater strides in sectors not subject to export controls, such as solar panel manufacturing and electric vehicles.