WASHINGTON: The United States on Tuesday said it was tightening curbs on exports of state-of-the-art AI chips to China, sending the share price of Nvidia and other semiconductor companies plummeting on Wall Street.

The measures are the latest chapter in the policy started under the Trump administration to limit Beijing’s ability to gain too much ground and become a leading tech economy.

“Today’s updated rules will increase the effectiveness of our controls and further shut off pathways to evade our restrictions,” said US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo.

The new rules tighten measures taken a year ago that banned the sale to China of microchips that are crucial to the manufacturing of powerful AI systems. But calls heightened to close off the supply chain even further after the world discovered the powers of AI with the launch of ChatGPT.

Published in Dawn, October 18th, 2023