Jam Kraprayoon, Shaun Ee, and Erich Grunewald
Over the past two years, Chinese actors have used a gray market network of buyers, sellers, and brokers in Southeast Asia to circumvent U.S. restrictions on cutting-edge chips used for artificial intelligence and other high performance computing applications. Donald Trump laid the groundwork for controls on specialized AI chips in 2020, with restrictions seeking to prevent China from using Western technology for military advantage. But while the Biden administration substantially expanded the scope of these controls, it struggled to stop the rise of AI chip smuggling, with multiple cases over the past year involving bulk shipments worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
Trump has the chance to seal the deal on the AI chip controls that he introduced, pushing Southeast Asian countries toward stronger enforcement using bargaining tactics like what he considers the “most beautiful word in the dictionary”: tariffs. Both improved corporate due diligence and local export enforcement programs in Southeast Asia would help counter Chinese AI chip smuggling, but these are backburner issues for most regional AI chip resellers and customs agencies. There is ample room for dealmaking here, and Trump’s willingness to recently let Nvidia and AMD continue exporting some cutting-edge AI chips to China with a 15 percent tax shows that he is open to unconventional arrangements mixing trade measures with export controls.
No comments:
Post a Comment