US government reportedly plans to restrict the sale of AI cloud services to Chinese companies.
The U.S. Commerce Department is reportedly readying new rules that would restrict American cloud providers from selling certain services to customers in China, according to the Wall Street Journal. The new sales curbs are expected to roll out within weeks. The report comes a few days after China imposed export restrictions on gallium and germanium, two metals that are widely used in semiconductor manufacturing.
The upcoming Commerce Department rules will apply to cloud services powered by artificial intelligence chips. Services from Amazon Web Services Inc. and Microsoft Corp., the two largest players in the cloud market, will reportedly be among the affected offerings. Providers will have to seek government permission before they can sell the services covered under the upcoming rules to customers in China.
AWS and other major cloud providers offer numerous compute instances powered by AI-optimized chips, many of which run on Nvidia Corp. graphics processing units. Some major providers also offer instances powered by AI chips from Advanced Micro Devices Inc. and Intel Corp.'s Habana unit, though those products are used to a lesser extent than Nvidia silicon. Additionally, AWS and Google LLC use internally developed silicon. Google Cloud offers instances powered by a homegrown line of AI chips known as the TPU series, while AWS has developed two sets of custom AI chips: the AWS Trainium series for training neural networks and the AWS Inferentia series for performing inference to run those neural network models.
The new rules would follow a related set of export restrictions introduced last year that banned Nvidia and AMD from selling their most advanced AI-optimized graphics cards to customers in China. Following the introduction of those curbs, Nvidia developed slower versions of its two fastest data center GPUs, known as the A800 and the H800, which don't meet the performance threshold necessary for the export restrictions to apply. Last week, the Journal reported that the Commerce Department is considering expanding the curbs to cover the A800 and H800.
The current export restrictions encompass not only AI chips but also other technologies, including many types of semiconductor manufacturing equipment. The Commerce Department has banned companies from supplying customers in China with tools that can be used to make processors based on the FinFET architecture. Tools needed for the production of advanced DRAM and flash chips are also covered by the rules, and the Commerce Department has restricted the sale of certain components that can be used to make semiconductor manufacturing equipment.