US Still Planning to Deny China ‘Highest-End’ Chip Tech, White House Official Says
The Trump administration plans to maintain strict China-related export controls on the most advanced semiconductors and chip manufacturing equipment, a senior White House official said last week, adding that the U.S. also doesn’t plan to automatically greenlight all H20 chip exports to China.
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Michael Kratsios, director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, was asked to explain the administration’s chip export control strategy during an event last week hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Although the administration appears to be relaxing its China-related controls in some areas, including through the granting of export license applications for shipments of Nvidia’s advanced H20 chips (see 2507150013), Kratsios stressed that the H20s aren’t a “free-for-all sale” to China.
He noted that Nvidia still has to apply for licenses, and the Bureau of Industry and Security will be “evaluating each of those license applications and weighing the costs and benefits.” Asked whether military and intelligence end-user restrictions will apply to H20 license applications, Kratsios said: “You can imagine those would be contemplated.”
Kratsios also said the administration wants to continue withholding the most advanced chip-related technology, especially those involving cutting-edge lithography machines.
“We generally believe” that “the highest-end semiconductors need to continue to be export-controlled and not allowed into China,” he said. He said U.S. restrictions imposed on chip manufacturing equipment during Trump’s first term “were probably one of the strongest actions that we ever took, and most effective. And those are still in place.”
The White House AI Action Plan, which was released in July and calls on BIS to consider new controls on subsystems of chip manufacturing equipment (see 2507230028), “continues to contemplate whether there are other items that need to be thought about there,” Kratsios added.
He said many of those subsystem components are of U.S. origin, “and I think that opens up a lot more opportunity and thinking strategically about the types of machines and capabilities that you want to limit the Chinese access to.” He said it’s less important to cut “everything off from China” and more important that the U.S. think “carefully” about, “as we’re doing these trade-offs, what do we think is most important? And it continues to kind of be this balancing act.”
Kratsios also said U.S. export enforcement is “key,” saying the U.S. needs to “do better as a country” enforcing its export control laws. “You can have the best export controls in the books, but if you’re not able to effectively enforce them because you’re resource constrained, that’s a challenge,” he said. “We have to find ways to provide the tools that BIS needs to do the enforcement activities necessary.”