US warns that using Huawei AI chip ‘anywhere’ breaks its rules

[NEW YORK] The Commerce Department issued guidance stating that the use of Huawei Technologies’ Ascend artificial intelligence (AI) chips “anywhere in the world” violates the government’s export controls, escalating US efforts to curb technological advances in China.

The agency’s Bureau of Industry and Security said on Tuesday (May 13) that it’s also planning to warn the public about “the potential consequences of allowing US AI chips to be used for training and inference of Chinese AI models”. The training of AI models involves bombarding them with data to teach them to recognise patterns. Inference, meanwhile, is the stage where models use that training to carry out tasks.

Commerce’s guidance stands to make it all the more difficult for Shenzhen-based Huawei to fulfil its ambitions of developing more powerful chips for AI and smartphones, efforts that have already hit major snags because of US sanctions.

Huawei was designing its next two Ascend processors – China’s answer to Nvidia’s dominant accelerators – around the same seven-nanometre architecture that’s been mainstream for years, Bloomberg reported in November. US-led restrictions had already kept Huawei’s chipmaking partners from procuring state-of-the-art systems.

The bureau laid out the new instructions while more broadly announcing the rescission of Biden administration-era regulations on the export of semiconductors used in developing AI. Those rules had drawn strenuous objections from US allies and companies, including Nvidia and Oracle.

Biden’s regulations “would have undermined US diplomatic relations with dozens of countries by downgrading them to second-tier status”, the Commerce Department said on Tuesday, adding that it will publish a notice that formalises the rescission of the rule and issue a replacement “in the future”.

The Trump administration is drafting its own approach and could shift towards negotiating individual deals with countries, according to sources familiar with the matter.

The Commerce Department said in its statement that whatever comes of it will be “a bold, inclusive strategy to American AI technology with trusted foreign countries around the world, while keeping the technology out of the hands of our adversaries”. BLOOMBERG