Hold Off on More China Chip Controls, SIA Tells Biden Admin
The Biden administration should wait to place new export controls on the semiconductor industry until it adequately assesses the impact of its existing restrictions, the Semiconductor Industry Association said this week. The U.S. chip industry should be able to continue accessing the China market, SIA said, warning that “repeated steps” to “impose overly broad, ambiguous, and at times unilateral restrictions risk diminishing the U.S. semiconductor industry’s competitiveness, disrupting supply chains, causing significant market uncertainty, and prompting continued escalatory retaliation by China.”
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SIA’s comments came as the administration reportedly considers expanding U.S. export controls to cover a broader set of artificial intelligence-related chips, which could be released when the Bureau of Industry and Security finalizes its Oct. 7 chip export controls (see 2210070049). American chipmaker Nvidia said the new restrictions could deal permanent damage to U.S. chip industry sales in China (see 2306290048).
Both the U.S. and China should “ease tensions and seek solutions through dialogue, not further escalation,” SIA said. “And we urge the administration to refrain from further restrictions until it engages more extensively with industry and experts to assess the impact of current and potential restrictions to determine whether they are narrow and clearly defined, consistently applied, and fully coordinated with allies.”
Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, said several semiconductor companies are lobbying the administration against imposing new AI-related chip controls. "We have three major technology companies" that are "appealing to the White House to export advanced semiconductor chips that China could use to put in their AI," McCaul said during a July 17 interview with Washington Post Live. He said China is using those technologies to "build a more advanced military system, the likes of which we haven't seen."
"We should not be exporting to China things that they can use to put in their most advanced weapons systems," McCaul said.
The White House didn’t comment.