U.S. export controls to China upgraded, taking effect Thursday!

On March 29, the U.S. government revised export restrictions established five months ago and upgraded measures to control the export of Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) chips and related tools. This is used to restrict China's access to advanced artificial intelligence chips and chip manufacturing tools.

Reuters reported that the revised new regulation document is 166 pages long and will take effect on April 4. Among them, restrictions on Chinese chip exports also apply to laptops containing AI chips, which means that U.S. chip restrictions on China have been expanded to the wider consumer electronics field. At the same time, the U.S. Department of Commerce, which is responsible for export controls, announced that it plans to continue to upgrade restrictions on China's technology exports, while seeking to strengthen and fine-tune these measures.

In the past period of time, the U.S. government has continued to strengthen export controls on China's semiconductors, AI chips and other fields.

On August 9, 2022, US President Biden signed the "Chip and Science Act" totaling up to US$280 billion, promoting the return of chip manufacturing to the United States through huge industrial subsidies of US$52.7 billion and provisions to curb competition. The bill prohibits companies from the United States and its allies and partners that receive subsidies from building or expanding advanced process chip factories in China and other concerned countries.

The U.S. Department of Commerce's Bureau of Industry and Security proposed export controls on China's advanced semiconductors and computing equipment in October 2022 and October 2023 respectively. Many GPU and AI chip products from Huida, AMD, and Intel can no longer be exported to China. , even the high-end gaming graphics card RTX 4090 is limited.

In December 2023, the U.S. Department of Commerce's Bureau of Industry and Security announced the launch of an investigation into the semiconductor supply chain of mature process nodes, targeting China's semiconductor industry.

On March 31, China's Ministry of Commerce stated on the U.S.'s revised semiconductor export control measures: “The U.S. has revised its semiconductor export control measures, less than half a year after the last time the U.S. introduced measures. Companies from all over the world, including U.S. companies, hope to have a Stable and predictable business environment. The US generalizes the concept of national security, arbitrarily changes rules, and tightens control measures. This not only creates more obstacles for Chinese and American companies to carry out normal economic and trade cooperation, but also imposes a heavier compliance burden. , has also caused huge uncertainty to the global semiconductor industry. This has seriously affected the mutually beneficial cooperation between Chinese and foreign companies and undermined their legitimate rights and interests. China is firmly opposed to this."

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