US Will Levy More Restrictions on China's AI and Supercomputing Firms

The White House is about to announce regulations that would further limit China's access to cutting-edge computing equipment that could be utilized by its military, according to a report by The New York Times.

The new regulations could reportedly be announced this week, and it is believed to hinder Beijing's capacity to develop advanced weaponry and surveillance systems.

Trade Limits

This will add another layer of trade limits that already blocked companies from selling US-developed technologies to Chinese entities such as Huawei, which former President Donald Trump imposed in 2019.

According to sources who spoke to The New York Times, President Joe Biden is likely to impose such limitations on more Chinese businesses, government research facilities, and other organizations.

The sale of any technology developed in the United States to the targeted organizations may subsequently be outlawed by companies around the world, according to the report.

Reuters reported last month that the White House might try to limit the export of sophisticated US-made tools to China's semiconductor industry. Additionally, it might prevent American microchip shipments to highly developed Chinese supercomputers and data centers.

The rules may affect governmental organizations, educational institutions, and internet powerhouses like Alibaba and Tencent.

China is the country with the most systems, despite the U.S. having the Top500 supercomputer list's highest performance, as noted by Engadget.

While the majority of supercomputing applications are beneficial, others, like the creation of weapons or surveillance, are harmful. Engadget noted that a supercomputer built with Intel and NVIDIA chips was once used to monitor the country's minority Uyghur population.

U.S.' Technological Crackdown on China

This news comes after a new regulation that would limit the sale of computer chips needed for supercomputers and artificial intelligence to Russia and China has been proposed by the U.S. government and is currently being implemented.

According to information provided by the government to NVIDIA, the new license stipulation will handle the possibility that Russia and China could use the impacted products for military objectives.

This move also demonstrates a significant escalation of the U.S.'s crackdown on several technological abilities of China at a time when tensions are rising over Taiwan, which is responsible for producing chips for NVidia and almost every big chip company.

According to research released by the Center for Security in Emerging Technology, or CSET, China is progressing toward its goal of becoming a global powerhouse in artificial intelligence by 2030, thanks to chips developed by U.S. companies.

Based on 97 publicly available documents of the Chinese military's procurement of A.I. processors, nearly all of them were created by American firms Nvidia, Xilinx (now AMD), Intel, or Microsemi, as per the researcher's findings.

The aforementioned US-designed chips, according to Defense One, are reportedly produced in huge quantities by Asian firms such as the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company in Taiwan and Samsung in South Korea.

This article is owned by Tech Times

Written by Joaquin Victor Tacla