Report: US restricts sales of sophisticated chips to China, Russia

WASHINGTON, Sep 1 (PRIME) -- The U.S. President Joe Biden administration has imposed new restrictions on sales of some sophisticated computer chips to China and Russia, the New York Times reported late on Wednesday.

The daily said it is the U.S. government’s latest attempt to use semiconductors as a tool to hobble rivals’ advances in fields such as high-performance computing and artificial intelligence.

The new limits affect high-end models of chips known as graphics processing units, or GPUs, which are sold by the Silicon Valley companies Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD).

Such products were originally developed to render images in video games but in the past decade were widely deployed in the largest supercomputers used by scientists and by Internet companies for applications such as recognizing speech and objects in photographs.

Nvidia and AMD acknowledged the new restrictions.

Nvidia, by far the largest GPU maker, said the federal government would now require it to seek export licenses to sell two high-end chips used with server systems in data centers. The government said the new requirement would address the risk that those products might be used in, or diverted to, a military use in China and Russia, according to the company.

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