Crackdown on China! How the US will decide who to punish with tech curbs
Deciding who gets hurt by sweeping new U.S. curbs on selling technology to China will come down in part to what constitutes a "supercomputer," experts told Reuters.
Around the world, the semiconductor industry on Friday began to wrestle with wide-ranging U.S. restrictions on selling chips and chip manufacturing equipment to China.
Shares of chip equipment makers drooped, but industry experts said a new U.S. definition of a supercomputer could be pivotal to the new rules' impact on China.
Supercomputers can be used in developing nuclear weapons and other military technologies, and experts say how to define them has long bedeviled regulators trying to pin down an ever-advancing technological target.
The new American rules define supercomputers broadly in terms of computing power in a defined space: a machine with 100 petaflops - the ability to carry out 100 trillion operations per second - in 41,600 cubic feet, with some other caveats.
Senior government officials said in a media briefing that their intention was to target only China's most advanced systems that could represent a national security threat to the United States rather than commercial activity.
But experts wondered whether Chinese tech giants' densely packed data centers owned by the likes of Alibaba Group Holding or TikTok-owner ByteDance might soon reach supercomputer status based on the new definition, even if that is not what U.S. regulators intended.
"Data center build-outs like Alibaba or ByteDance would have the potential to reach petaflop build-outs," said CCS Insight chip analyst Wayne Lam said.
The new definition is unlikely to change as industry technology improves. Current-day Chinese supercomputers may one day become the corporate
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