Two US Lawmakers Urge Biden Administration To Tighten Export Restrictions On Artificial Intelligence Chips To China

Mike Gallagher, a Republican and chair of the Selection Committee of the Representative Council on China (photo: Twitter @RepGallagher)

JAKARTA - Two United States lawmakers who led a committee focused on China on Friday, July 28 urged the Joe Biden administration to tighten export restrictions on artificial intelligence (AI) chips following industry lobbying efforts to maintain unchanged rules.

Member of the House of Representatives Mike Gallagher, a Republican and chairman of the House of Representatives' selection committee on China, and member of the King Krishna Moorthi Representative Council, a Democratic Party member and senior committee member, in a letter to Trade Minister Gina Raimondo asked to "more strengthen" a broad set of export control rules imposed in October that limited China's access to the top AI chips made by US companies such as Nvidia, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), and Intel.

The letter urged US officials to take a more stringent approach than reported by Reuters last month that they were being considered.

Rules in October 2022 set two limits on exporting AI chips to China - one for how quickly chips can communicate with each other, and the second for chip processing speeds.

After the rules took effect, Nvidia created a dedicated chip for China at lower interconnect speeds. Intel this month also said it had created an AI chip that could be sold in China.

But the Nvidia chip still has a high enough processing speed to be used to create an AI system, and Reuters reported in May that US export control had little impact on the development of China's AI sector.

Last month, Reuters reported that US officials were considering tightening the rules by focusing solely on processing speeds, which could affect Nvidia chips. Nvidia at the time said that limiting sales of its AI chips to China "would result in a permanent loss of opportunities for the US industry."

The potential for the imposition of the rules sparked a number of lobbying activities, as Nvidia CEO Intel and Qualcomm traveled to Washington last week to meet with government officials to discuss China's policies.

On the same day as the visit, the Semiconductor Industry Association, a US-based industry group, urged the Biden administration to allow "the industry to continue access to the Chinese market, the world's largest semiconductor commodity market."

On Friday, Gallagher and Krishna Moorthi urged a more stringent approach than previously reported by Reuters to be considered by officials. The parliamentarian letter recommends maintaining a speed limit on how quickly chips can communicate with each other and says that "must be lowered enough to prevent intelligent engineering that avoids regulation."

The lawmaker also urged government officials to "consider carefully" how to cut off access by Chinese companies to advanced computing chips in the cloud, where major US companies such as Amazon.com, Microsoft, and Alphabet's Google offer the chips to be leased as part of their cloud computing services.

"We urge you to further strengthen the rules on October 7, 2022, so that US advanced technology and expertise related to computing and semiconductor are not used against the United States," Gallagher and Krishna Moorthi wrote.