The Commerce Department on Tuesday updated and broadened its export controls to stop China from acquiring advanced computer chips and the equipment to manufacture them.
The revisions come roughly a year after the export controls were first launched to counter the use of the chips for military applications that include the development of hypersonic missiles and artificial intelligence.
“These export controls are intended to protect technologies that have clear national security or human rights implications,” Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said on a call with reporters. “The vast majority of semiconductors will remain unrestricted. But when we identify national security or human rights threats, we will act decisively and in concert with our allies.”
Yeah, the West kept semiconductor technology away from the Soviets for years and even though the Soviets managed ways of importing it through grey markets in other countries, their reverse-engineering attempts were consistently a decade or more behind the West, something that’s continued to this day in Russia.