USA it is preparing to limit access to various cloud computing services to Chinese companies. Among them, those offered by both Amazon through AWS and Microsoft with Azure. According to Bloomberg, the US authorities are considering the possibility that cloud providers will have to obtain permission from the government before authorizing Chinese companies that use such services to use cloud computing platforms to train Artificial Intelligence models.
US officials are concerned that having access to certain cloud computing services could allow Chinese companies and the military to get the computing power needed for training AI models, thus bypassing the need for invest money in their own data centers with computers and chips that they can no longer access due to the export restrictions that their companies and entities already support.
In addition, the Biden Administration plans to tighten the measures against China, and the export controls that it announced last October, which restricted the sale of certain AI chips to China, with the aim of limiting the country’s possibilities to develop a technology considered key to China’s economic and geopolitical future. Apart from the aforementioned permission, other measures that are being valued is the restriction of access to the cloud for AI developers from China.
On the other hand, it is expected that this same month of July a proposal from the Department of Commerce will be presented in the United States, which would include the revision of the country’s export controls to toughen the sale of some chips to China without having a specific license. to be able to do it. This step is intended in part to prevent China from gaining access to Nvidia’s A800 chip, which the company designed before the previous Chinese export controls were announced, and was therefore not affected by them.
The new rules will expand their scope to cover two key parameters for export controls imposed since last year: restricting the throughput capacity of chips and the ability to assemble chips together to maximize their power and performance.
Meanwhile, in China are also taking various measures in response to these steps. Earlier this week, the Chinese authorities have imposed export controls on various critical metals for the chip manufacturing, electronic vehicle and defense sectors.
