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The Joe Biden administration has unveiled sweeping curbs on the sale of advanced AI chips by semiconductor companies including Nvidia Corp.
The new rules will limit the number of AI chips that can be exported to most countries. It will allow unlimited access to US AI technology for America’s closest allies, while also maintaining a block on exports to China, Russia, Iran and North Korea.
The rules are set to take effect in one year.
“The U.S. leads AI now – both AI development and AI chip design, and it’s critical that we keep it that way,” Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said.
She stressed that the Biden administration sought to strike a balance between protecting national security and allowing trade in chips to continue.
The new curbs will be placed on advanced graphics processing units (GPUs), which are used to power data centers needed to train AI models. The restrictions do not apply to gaming chips.
Nvidia called the rules “sweeping overreach” and said the White House would be clamping down on “technology that is already available in mainstream gaming PCs and consumer hardware.”
After the new rules come into effect, cloud service providers such as Microsoft, Google and Amazon will be able to seek global authorizations to build data centers. They would no longer need export licenses for AI chips, allowing them to build data centers in countries that cannot import enough chips because of the US-imposed quotas.
In addition, US-headquartered providers likely to receive global authorizations such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft will be allowed to deploy only 50% of their total AI computing power outside the United States, no more than 25% outside of the Tier 1 countries and no more than 7% in a single non-Tier 1 country.
Until now, the Biden administration had imposed sweeping restrictions on China’s access to advanced chips and the equipment to produce them, updating the controls annually to tighten restrictions and capture countries at risk of diverting the technology to China.
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