Report: US to Limit Sales of AI Cloud Services to Chinese Companies

The U.S. Commerce Department is reportedly preparing new rules to restrict U.S. cloud providers from selling certain services to Chinese customers.

wall street journal report Today’s development was revealed as a story of a person familiar with the situation. New sales restrictions are expected to be introduced in the coming weeks. The report comes days after China imposed export restrictions on gallium and germanium, two metals widely used in semiconductor manufacturing.

The upcoming Commerce Department rule will apply to cloud services powered by artificial intelligence chips, according to people familiar with the matter. Services from Amazon Web Services and Microsoft, two major players in the cloud market, are reportedly among the affected products. Providers are believed to need government approval before selling services subject to the upcoming regulation to Chinese customers.

AWS and other major cloud providers offer thousands of compute instances with AI-optimized chips. Many of these instances run on Nvidia Corp. graphics processing units. Some big providers also offer AI chip-powered instances of Advanced Micro Devices Inc. and Intel Corp.’s Habana unit, but the range of usage of those products is lower than his Nvidia silicon.

In addition to GPUs supplied by third-party suppliers, AWS and Google LLC also use internally developed silicon. Google Cloud offers instances powered by self-developed AI chips known as the TPU series. AWS, on the other hand, he developed not one but two sets of custom AI chips. The AWS Trainium series for training neural networks and the AWS Inferentia series for running inference to run those neural network models.

New rules reportedly applied by the Department of Commerce to cloud services powered by AI chips will follow a series of related export controls. introduced last year. These regulations prevented Nvidia and AMD from selling their cutting-edge AI-optimized graphics cards to Chinese customers.

Following Curb’s introduction, Nvidia has developed slower versions of its two fastest data center GPUs. These slower versions, known as the A800 and H800, do not meet the performance thresholds required for export restrictions to apply. In last week’s journal, report The Department of Commerce is considering widening the curbs to cover the A800 and H800.

Current export restrictions cover not only AI chips, but other technologies as well. These technologies include various types of semiconductor manufacturing equipment.

The Commerce Department has banned companies from supplying Chinese customers with tools that could be used to manufacture processors based on the FinFET architecture, a type of widely used transistor design. The rules also cover the tools needed to manufacture advanced DRAM and Flash chips. In addition, the Department of Commerce has restricted the sale of certain parts that can be used in the manufacture of semiconductor manufacturing equipment.

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