The US restricts advanced chip exports to China
The rules covered the tools to make advanced chips, not only the chips, and barred US citizens from supporting Chinese chipmaking.
- Government & policy
- Compute & infrastructure
- Era-defining
On 7 October 2022 the US Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security issued a package of export controls designed to slow China’s development of advanced computing. Because the rules reached beyond finished products to the equipment and expertise used to make them, they are usually treated as the start of the modern chip-control regime rather than an extension of the older ones.
The controls had three main parts. The first restricted the export to China of the most capable data-centre chips used to train large AI models, setting performance thresholds pitched at the level of Nvidia’s then-leading accelerators. The second, through a new classification for certain semiconductor-manufacturing equipment, restricted the tools and components needed to produce advanced logic and memory chips. The third barred “US persons” — American citizens and residents — from supporting the development or production of advanced chips at certain Chinese fabs without a licence, a provision that reached individuals as well as companies. Commerce framed the measures as necessary to keep advanced computing and semiconductors from Chinese military and surveillance use.
The immediate commercial effect fell on Nvidia, whose top training chips could no longer be sold into China. The company responded by designing cut-down parts — the A800 and later the H800 — engineered to sit just under the thresholds, though BIS said such chips could still provide close to the same AI training capability. That gap prompted a tightening a year later, in October 2023, which lowered the thresholds and pulled the modified chips into scope.
The 2022 rules set the pattern for what followed: a recurring cycle of controls, corporate workarounds and further controls, and a durable link between AI policy and semiconductor policy. They opened what became the defining geopolitical front of the period, shaping where models could be trained, which companies could sell where, and how China’s own chip and model efforts developed.