The Biden Government’s plans for AI chip curbs to hurt America’s competitiveness, says NVIDIA *Updated*
The move would create three different tiers with countries ranked on how "friendly" they are perceived to be to the United States.
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*Updated: 14 January 10.35 with comments from the EU.*
Photo: Pixabay
Following a reported plan by the Joe Biden administration to impose new restrictions on AI chip exports in his effort to keep advanced technologies out of the hands of China and Russia, NVIDIA has released a blog post calling the move “misguided”.
Ned Finkle, Vice President of Government Affairs, NVIDIA said:
The Biden Administration now seeks to restrict access to mainstream computing applications with its unprecedented and misguided “AI Diffusion” rule which threatens to derail innovation and economic growth worldwide.
The move would involve an expansion of semiconductor curbs to most of the world and create three tiers of countries with varying levels of restrictions. At the top would be those countries recognised as United States (US) allies and would be able to have unfettered access to American processors. Next would be most countries who’d face some limits on the total computing power they could buy. Finally, hostile nation states would be effectively blocked from importing any processors.
Countries on the second list (SIngapore is on this list) could get more than their quota if they agree to become a Universal Validated End User where they agree to abide by a set of US government security requirements and human rights standards. Placing caps on U.S. exports of AI GPUs would limit market opportunities for US companies while providing an open door for foreign suppliers of AI chips.
An Information Technology and Innovation Foundation report (ITIF) said that "the proposed framework fails to address the core challenge in a targeted way, and would have potentially catastrophic consequences for U.S. digital industry leadership".
It added that, "By artificially restricting AI chip exports to the vast majority of the world, the U.S. government essentially forces open the door for foreign competition across the globe, redirecting revenue that could be flowing to U.S. chipmakers to invest in next-generation chips with competitors abroad".
Finkle added that the move also serves to hurt the US’s global competitiveness saying, “This sweeping overreach would impose bureaucratic control over how America’s leading semiconductors, computers, systems, and even software are designed and marketed globally. And by attempting to rig market outcomes and stifle competition—the lifeblood of innovation—the Biden Administration’s new rule threatens to squander America’s hard-won technological advantage and weaken America’s global competitiveness.
This was supported by The Information Technology Industry Council, representing companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta, who said that the move would place arbitrary constraints on U.S. companies' ability to sell computing systems overseas and cede the global market to competitors.
The European Union (EU) also released a saying:
We are concerned about the US measures adopted today restricting access to advanced AI chip exports for selected EU Member States and their companies.
We believe it is also in the US economic and security interest that the EU buys advanced AI chips from the US without limitations: we cooperate closely, in particular in the field of security, and represent an economic opportunity for the US, not a security risk.
With NVIDIA leading the way in the demand for AI chips, these proposed curbs could disrupt this growth and could open the door to rivals and large-scale disruption not just to AI research, but to data centre, cloud computing, and high-performance computing operations.
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