The trade tensions between China and the US over semiconductors have been further strained.
On Monday, China’s market regulator ruled that, as Bloomberg first reported, semiconductor giant Nvidia violated the country’s antitrust regulations. The ruling linked the 2020 acquisition of NVIDIA by computer networking supplier Mellanox Technologies for $7 billion.
An Nvidia spokesman provided the following statement: “We will comply with the law in all respects. We will continue to work with all relevant government agencies in assessing the impact of export controls on competition in the commercial market.”
China will not release any results related to its findings and will continue to investigate. Still, the ruling is likely to support ongoing tariff negotiations between the US and China in Madrid. While these trade debates are not about semiconductors, the issue of access to China’s Nvidia chips is the main point of competition between the two regimes.
The resignation of the Biden administration announced AI spread rules in January. This aims to limit US AI chips to many countries, especially as there are further restrictions due to China and other enemies.
The US Department of Commerce officially abolished Biden’s AI rules in May, but the future of AI chip exports to China remains in flux. The Trump administration slapped a license agreement for tipping to China in April. A few months later, in July, these companies were given a green light to start selling these chips again.
A few weeks later, the country attacked transactions that demanded that companies selling chips to China reduce the revenues of those sales by the US by 15%. China has discouraged companies from purchasing Nvidia chips, and at the time of the recent revenue call, none of the company’s chips have gone through a new export process.
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