U.S. authorities want to block Chinese artificial intelligence developers from accessing advanced overseas data centers

U.S. authorities have banned the direct supply of advanced U.S.-origin artificial intelligence accelerators to China under export control rules and are now trying to prevent Chinese developers from gaining access to computing power in foreign data centers. Deep in the corridors of American power, a corresponding legislative initiative is brewing.

Image source: NVIDIA

This is caused by Tom’s Hardcore Reference publications information. The new restrictions, if implemented, would prevent Chinese developers from accessing data centers equipped with advanced computing accelerators located outside China. Such computing facilities are currently located in Thailand, Singapore, and Malaysia; formally, Chinese developers are not prohibited from using them from a U.S. legal perspective. The U.S. Commerce Department, which is driving the initiative, will begin discussions with stakeholders next month.

In pure form, the export control rules implemented by the United States in this field since early 2025 prohibit unfriendly countries from obtaining computing power based on American advanced accelerators in this way, but during Trump’s second presidential term, relevant US agencies did not monitor compliance with this rule. Lobbying by AI accelerator providers, led by Nvidia, also blocked the expansion of export control rules. At least the company won the rights to supply H200 accelerators to China, and even made hundreds of millions of dollars in the second quarter.

All recent activity by Asian allies in complying with U.S. export control rules boils down to limiting the physical supply of U.S. accelerators to China. Given the advancement of Chinese artificial intelligence models, including Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3, attempts to prevent Chinese developers from remotely accessing next-generation computing power have become more frequent. U.S. officials suspect the latter is refining U.S. artificial intelligence models to achieve desired results. Kimi K3 is also believed to have been trained using data centers in Thailand. The issue remains a legal hurdle for the Commerce Department’s new initiative – the department officially has the authority to restrict only the physical movement of AI accelerators and does not have the legal ability to affect remote access. However, U.S. authorities have other tools to enforce such restrictions.