White House says Biden administration yet to say more details on AI chip rules

A White House official said on Friday that the Biden administration could shed more light on a possible new rule for exporting high-performance artificial intelligence chips to China.

Tarun Chhabra, an official with the National Security Council who focuses on technology issues, said letters sent by the U.S. Department of Commerce to Nvidia Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc last month asked them to stop shipments of chips that can be used for applications like natural language processing and nuclear weapons research were likely precursors to further regulation.

He said at an event hosted by the Brookings Institution that the regulation might take.

They tend to be followed by a public rule or regulation, laying out a rationale and the full approach, Chabbra said of the letters. We will be in a position to say more about that in the near future. The U.S. Commerce is preparing to impose restrictions on exporting AI chips that could be released as soon as October, according to a report earlier this month.

The news on September 1 that the chip companies had received letters caused Nvidia's stock to fall after the company disclosed the letters could affect as much as $400 million in revenue in its current fiscal quarter.

American officials didn't say how the new restrictions would be written.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said earlier this month that the letters spelled out curbs on chips with a combination of a chip's performance and ability to connect to other chips to move large amounts of data around a data center, a feature that only affects a small number of Nvidia's products.

Chabbra said on Friday that the restrictions only affect the most advanced chips and are structured as a combination of computing power and interconnect speed.