US Tightens AI Chip Export Rules, 18 Allied Countries Get Full Access

Liputan6.com, Jakarta – The United States government has announced that it will tighten export regulations for AI chips to a number of countries. It is stated that this regulation will focus on chips produced with 14nm, 16nm or more advanced technology.

Through this regulation, the US government will implement different AI chip export policies, depending on the tier of the country. Quoted from BBCThursday (17/1/2025), there are 18 countries included in tier 1 of this policy.

From the information gathered, most of these countries are allies or close partners of the United States. Some of them are the United Kingdom, South Korea, Japan, the Netherlands, as well as Australia and New Zealand.

Meanwhile, most other countries in the world are reported to be in tier 2. This tier is filled with other countries that are not in tier 1 or 3, such as Singapore, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, including European Union countries such as Poland.

Meanwhile for tier 3, a total of 22 countries are included in it, including China, Hong Kong and Macau, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Syria.

The new regulations limiting exports of AI chips are said to support national security and United States foreign policy.

Apart from that, this regulation also supports the government’s strategy to develop a safe and trusted technology ecosystem, as well as the responsible deployment of AI.

It was also stated that this regulation would focus on chips produced with 14nm or 16nm technology and those that are more advanced, and contain more than 30 billion transistors.

For this reason, chips that have a collective computing power of up to around 1,700 GPUs do not fall under this restriction. Usually, these chips are used for harmless university, institutional or research needs.

Later, with this restriction, the 18 countries included in tier 1 will be able to get full access to AI chip technology made by US companies.

While other countries that are not included in tier 1 and are not countries of concern, can apply for permission to buy up to 320,000 GPUs. Then, other countries can only buy up to 50,000 GPUs per country.