A Bureau of Industry and Security official last week confirmed the agency sent letters to specific companies restricting their ability to export certain artificial intelligence-related chips to China, and said more restrictions may be coming. In the agency’s first public comments on the matter, Thea Kendler, BIS’s assistant secretary for export administration, said the agency hopes the letters help inform industry about the types of exports the agency is scrutinizing.
Despite the fact that the administration has not opened any formal free trade agreement negotiations in two years, the House Ways and Means Committee chairman said he's confident a trade agreement can be reached with Taiwan.
While the Biden administration hasn't yet decided whether to establish an outbound investment screening regime, officials believe more investment screening could help fill certain gaps in semiconductor-related export controls, said Peter Harrell, a National Security Council official. Harrell said an outbound regime also could provide the U.S. with more information about global semiconductor investments, which could be useful as the U.S. seeks to stop China from acquiring advanced chip equipment.
Electric vehicle manufacturing and supply chain resilience in semiconductors continued as major topics in the U.S.-Mexico High-Level Economic Dialogue, and pharmaceutical supply chain resilience is now also on the agenda, according to a joint statement after the HLED in Mexico City Sept. 12.
U.S. goods exports to China this year are on pace with the low export numbers from 2021, although energy exports have dropped 13% and semiconductor exports continue to suffer, the Peterson Institute for International Economics said this week. And even though agricultural exports to China are up 16% this year, Chinese purchases of U.S. goods are still falling well short of commitments made under the Trump administration’s phase one trade deal, PIIE said. “The promise” of President Donald Trump's “trade war and agreement was that things should have been much better for US exporters by now.”
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The Commerce Department is planning to expand export controls over certain semiconductor items destined to China (see 2208010011) next month, including those used for artificial intelligence and chipmaking tools, Reuters reported Sept. 11. Commerce already outlined some new restrictions in letters earlier this year to KLA, Lam Research and Applied Materials, Reuters said, which include new export licensing requirements on chipmaking equipment to Chinese factories capable of making chips more advanced than 14 nanometers. The new rules would also codify restrictions outlined by Commerce in letters to NVIDIA and AMD last month (see 2209010059), the report said.
New multilateral export controls on certain electronic computer-aided design (ECAD) software won’t have an immediate effect on semiconductor companies and are unlikely to cause wide concern in the short term, industry officials said. The controls, announced by the Bureau of Industry and Security Aug. 15 (see 2208120038) and effective in October, seek to restrict an emerging technology that may not be commercially available for at least two years, although officials say it remains unclear what exactly the restrictions will cover.
The Biden administration is considering a set of executive orders to restrict investment and sales involving advanced technologies in China, according to a Sept. 2 post on Medium from Semafor technology reporter Reed Albergotti. Citing people with knowledge of the plans, Albergotti said one order would “narrow” the types of technology that “can be sold to Chinese customers.” The other executive order, for which plans are still up in the air, would involve either a notification scheme for investments in certain technologies including semiconductors, artificial intelligence and quantum computing, or a mechanism for the U.S. government to block such investments, similar to the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., or both, Albergotti said. President Joe Biden is expected to sign the executive order on investment as early as September, the post said. The White House did not comment.
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