The US wants to bring China to its knees: its strategy involves minimizing the sale of AI chips

The United States has been “torpedoing” China for months with increasingly harsh sanctions. In September 2022, he announced new sanctions that affected the semiconductor industry and especially the chips dedicated to training artificial intelligence systems. The Asian giant has managed to circumvent that veto, but things – which were already difficult – could get much more uphill very soon.

First it was advanced chips. When this restriction was activated, the United States prohibited NVIDIA from selling its most advanced GPUs for artificial intelligence applications. That prevented China from getting the very powerful (and very expensive) A100 and H100. Without those chips, training AI models and advancing in this segment is much more difficult.

China dodges the veto. Not being able to officially access these graphics, China resorted to somewhat more modest versions: the A800 —with less bandwidth— were an acceptable alternative, but along with them were also the H800, also somewhat trimmed versions of the powerful H100. .

underground market. In addition to these options, in China it was possible to find the NVIDIA A100 and H100 outside of official channels, in stores in the ‘underground’ market in cities like Shenzen or Hong Kong. Even so, both the price and the scarcity of these graphics on those channels was an added problem.

The US wants to suffocate China. as revealed in The Wall Street Journal, the Biden administration is considering putting new restrictions in place. The Commerce Department could bar the sale of chips from NVIDIA and other manufacturers to customers in China and other countries if they do not first obtain a license to buy them. The measures could enter into force the same month of July. This measure would mean that, for example, China could not buy A800 graphics cards, which for now they were able to acquire.

no clouds. In the United States they could go further and the restriction of access to cloud platforms to Chinese companies is being considered. Some of them, they say in WSJ, have taken advantage of these agreements to avoid the veto and make use of AI training platforms in the cloud.

there is still going back. The Biden administration’s plans are not final, and in fact it is most likely that no decision will be made until it is known how the negotiations of Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, who visit China in early July.

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