Geopolitics & Regulation
Export Controls and Hardware Policy
How chip export restrictions shape global AI development
What it is
The US government restricts export of advanced AI chips (NVIDIA H100, A100) and semiconductor manufacturing equipment to China and other nations. These controls aim to prevent adversaries from accessing the compute required to train frontier AI models.
The chokepoints: NVIDIA designs chips, TSMC (Taiwan) manufactures them using ASML (Netherlands) lithography equipment. US export controls cover multiple layers of this supply chain.
China's DeepSeek demonstrated in early 2025 that highly capable models could be trained with fewer chips through algorithmic efficiency improvements, raising questions about the long-term effectiveness of compute-focused controls.