According to a new Bloomberg report, the US government is considering taking additional steps to hobble China’s tech sector, specifically by limiting US investment in Chinese technology companies, as tensions mount between the world’s two largest economies.
Under the plan, it is expected the White House will sign an Executive Order dealing with curbs on investment in Chinese companies in the coming months. One source said that separate actions may be taken against TikTok, the popular Chinese-owned video-sharing application. It is also expected the Commerce Department will introduce further restrictions on the distribution of computer chips used for artificial intelligence computing.
It was reported the White House is holding discussions with Congress about a possible mechanism whereby US firms will have to give advance notice ahead of any such investments in certain Chinese industries, and the government will have a system designed to block such investments on national security grounds where necessary.
Two of the US’s largest chipmakers, Nvidia and AMD, announced earlier this week that they were unable to provide Russia and China with some of their most advanced artificial intelligence chips due to new restrictions put in place by Washington. The restrictions focused on GPUs, or Graphical Processing Units which were originally developed for video games, but which are being adapted by scientists and tech firms to perform machine learning for applications like recognizing speech and identifying objects pictured in photographs.
Under the new restrictions, the chip-producers will require special export licenses to try and prevent Russia and China from acquiring them and using them for weapons development and intelligence gathering.
The Daily Financial Trends