US loosening AI-chip exports to China 

According to media reports, the U.S. government is prepared to loosen the controls on exporting important AI chips to China. However, it would want a share of the proceeds, the Financial Times (FT) reported first on Sunday. In the future, chipmakers Nvidia and AMD would remit 15 percent of their revenue from chip sales in China to the U.S. government, the British financial newspaper said. The companies had reportedly agreed to this in order to obtain export licenses for semiconductors.

To meet the chip demand of its emerging AI industry, China is keen to remove trade restrictions on American semiconductors. Ahead of a possible summit between President Xi Jinping and U.S. President Donald Trump, this should be pressed as part of a trade agreement, the FT wrote. Chinese representatives reportedly told experts in Washington that Beijing desires a loosening of export restrictions for HBM chips (High-Bandwidth Memory). HBM chips are crucial for the rapid execution of data-intensive AI tasks. They are used together with AI GPUs, especially from Nvidia. According to the FT, China is concerned that U.S. controls on HBM could hinder the ability of Chinese companies like Huawei to develop their own AI chips.

In the U.S., commercial interests clash with security concerns on this issue. Several successive U.S. administrations have restricted the export of modern chips to China in order to curb AI development and military capabilities there. This has, on the one hand, limited opportunities for U.S. firms to meet the growing demand from China, one of the largest semiconductor markets in the world; on the other hand, the country remains an important revenue driver for American chipmakers.

MK