As well as equipment for their production.
Agency Bloomberg provides details of the US government’s plans to further limit the pace of development of Chinese artificial intelligence systems. Since almost all specialized computing accelerators use HBM memory in one way or another, US regulators are setting themselves the task of limiting its supplies to China, even involving foreign manufacturers such as SK hynix and Samsung.
Image source: Micron Technology
The latter use American technology or software to produce their memory chips, which gives the US authorities every reason to apply export control rules to the activities of these South Korean memory manufacturers. As expected, the supply of HBM2, HBM3 and HBM3E chips to China, as well as more modern ones that may appear in the future, will be banned from next month.
It is noteworthy that the American company Micron will suffer less from the upcoming restrictions, since it voluntarily stopped supplying its HBM memory to China in response to the sanctions that were imposed by the Chinese authorities against its products on the domestic market. The US authorities also intend to limit the supply of equipment for the production of HBM memory chips to China. It is generally accepted that the Chinese company CXMT has the appropriate equipment and is going to establish the production of HBM2 in the foreseeable future. It is not entirely clear how these restrictions will affect NVIDIA’s business, since it supplies computing accelerators to China adapted to the previous requirements of the US authorities, and the same H20 is equipped with HBM3 chips, which will be prohibited from being imported to China.
