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US-imposed curbs on advanced technology exports to China have held back its domestic artificial intelligence industry, experts said.
High-end chips like US chipmaker Nvidia’s new Blackwell models are crucial to advancing AI — but without ready access to them, Chinese firms are struggling to keep up with their western competitors.
China’s telecom giant Huawei has caught up with some developments despite US controls, and has developed high-powered chips of its own. But the race could get harder to run: On Tuesday, Saudi Arabia’s investment fund for AI and semiconductor technology said it would pull out of China if the US asked, while Washington announced it would revoke certain licenses to export tech to Huawei.
The US is also debating curbs on the software that powers AI, alongside hardware export controls, Reuters reported.
SIGNALS
China’s isolation could drag it down in the race for next-gen AI
It’s possible China won’t catch up to US firms because of the barriers on importing foreign-made, high-powered chips from abroad, researchers told Nature. China is lagging between five and 10 years behind the US, they said. The chips are the foundation of any technology with a computer, from cars to smartphones to satellites. And companies are racing to produce increasingly powerful semiconductor chips to run increasingly large AI models. The most successful chipmaker of the AI boom so far, Nvidia, is US-based, so the States have had a leg up. “We cannot get high-end Nvidia chips in China and we cannot fabricate high-end chips,” said Yu Wang, an engineer at Tsinghua University. Taiwanese company TSMC, which produces chips for Nvidia, can’t replicate them for Chinese firms, Wang added.
US revokes export licenses to China’s Huawei
Regulators in the US have struggled to contain tech exports to Huawei, a Chinese company that is blacklisted in the US over security concerns, but companies Intel and Qualcomm still did some business there. In the latest move, Washington revoked some export licenses to Huawei, which could curb the flow of chips into China to use in laptops and phones, the Financial Times reported. The decision shows Washington is serious about China’s security threat, one analyst said. “This is a clear indicator” that the US won’t back down on the restrictions, Meghan Harris, an expert in export control with Beacon Global Strategies, said. “We should anticipate any subsequent administration to continue on course.”
China, US could take the diplomatic route
Diplomats from Beijing and Washington will meet in Geneva later this month to discuss how AI should be used and when it should be banned. The talks could touch on whether AI should be used to control nuclear arsenals — a surprise, given China’s general reticence regarding the size of its nuclear program. The talks are part of the Biden administration’s cyber security strategy, The New York Times reported. Tech has increasingly become the “entire game” for foreign policy, Nathaniel C. Fick, the State Department’s ambassador for cyberspace and digital policy, told the Times. “The international order will be defined by whose metaphorical operating system dominates,” he said.