The US has convinced two other countries to join it in expanding a ban on exports of chip-making technology to China, according to a report by Bloomberg. The move could cramp China's home-grown chip industry as there are few, if any, other sources for the sophisticated technologies required for modern semiconductor manufacturing.
As part of a broader trade war with China, the US sought for its chip technology embargo from Japan and the Netherlands, where some of the world's largest manufacturers of semiconductor manufacturing equipment are headquartered. It first imposed restrictions on exports of chips to China in 2015, extending them in 2021 and twice in 2022. The most recent restrictions were introduced in December.
It has already banned exports of artificial intelligence hardware, such as graphical processing units (GPUs), tensor processing units (TPUs) and other advanced application-specific integrated circuits (ASICS), and the latest extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) equipment used to make them, and the Dutch government has followed suit. The Netherlands is home to ASML, the only manufacturer of EUV tools.
The US has now persuaded the Netherlands and Japan join it in banning transfers of some slightly older deep ultraviolet lithography (DUV) equipment. ASML makes this too, while Japan is home to DUV equipment makers such as Canon, Nikon and Tokyo Electron Ltd., making the two countries key to the US plan to gnaw away at China's dominance in the broader microchip market.
In contrast to newer chips such as the ones used in Apple's latest iPhones, made using EUV machines, the larger, older microchips made with DUV equipment are mostly used across the auto and the industrial sector.
The three countries finally reached agreement on restrictions on the export of some DUV equipment on January 27, 2022, Bloomberg reported.
"This is a significant escalation as it goes from preventing China's entry and progress in the high end to hindering its current semiconductor industry," said Josep Bori, research director for thematic intelligence at analytics and consulting company GlobalData.
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Nvidia tweaks flagship H100 chip for export to China as H800:
U.S. regulators last year put into place rules that stopped Nvidia from selling its two most advanced chips, the A100 and newer H100, to Chinese customers. Such chips are crucial to developing generative AI technologies like OpenAI's ChatGPT and similar products.
Reuters in November reported that Nvidia had designed a chip called the A800 that reduced some capabilities of the A100 to make the A800 legal for export to China.
On Tuesday, the company confirmed that it has similarly developed a China-export version of its H100 chip. The new chip, called the H800, is being used by the cloud computing units of Chinese technology firms such as Alibaba Group Holding, Baidu Inc and Tencent Holdings, a company spokesperson said.
U.S. regulators last fall imposed rules to slow China's development in key technology sectors such as semiconductors and artificial intelligence, aiming to hobble the country's efforts to modernize its military.
The rules around artificial intelligence chips imposed a test that bans those with both powerful computing capabilities and high chip-to-chip data transfer rates. Transfer speed is important when training artificial intelligence models on huge amounts of data because slower transfer rates mean more training time.
A chip industry source in China told Reuters the H800 mainly reduced the chip-to-chip data transfer rate to about half the rate of the flagship H100.
The Nvidia spokesperson declined to say how the China-focused H800 differs from the H100, except that "our 800 series products are fully compliant with export control regulations."
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US Wins Support From Japan and Netherlands to Clip China's Chip Industry
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 03, @01:01PM
Other than slowing china down by a few years