Chinese government responds to Biden chip trade war by banning AMD and Intel CPUs from government computers

The Chinese government has banned AMD and Intel CPUs from the list of authorized computer chips that can be used in government computers in further response to President Biden’s recent chip trade war actions.

In 2021, the president ordered U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo to turn America into a computer chip leader and promoted the CHIPS Act to increase US chip manufacturing capabilities, which had dropped to 12% of total worldwide production. China was in a similar position, manufacturing only 16% of the chips it used while importing $350 billion worth from global leaders such as TSMC and Samsung.

In 2022, President Biden inflamed the trade war. The Department of Commerce announced nine export control rules that restricted items such as fast GPUs such the Nvidia A100, CPU lithography machines from ASML, and CPU design software from being sent to China.

In 2023, China began responding after high-level discussions failed. The country first banned Apple iPhones from use at government agencies and state-owned companies. To showcase China’s semiconductor manufacturing strength, state-sponsored Huawei released the Huawei Mate 60 Pro smartphone using the Kirin 9000s manufactured at SMIC with 7nm process technology, a supposedly banned technology. Also, the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi unveiled the Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer assembled with Chinese CPUs, which immediately ranked 11th among the top 500 fastest supercomputers in the world.

Tired of the games, China banned AMD and Intel CPUs on December 26, 2023 through government orders and a list of approved technologies by the Chinese Information Technology Security Evaluation Center (CITSEC), allowing only Chinese CPUs, OSs, and databases for purchase and use in government computers and servers.

This year, Chinese chip maker Loongson announced the 3A6000 CPU alternative to Intel Raptor Lake CPUs in response to the ban of an AMD AI CPU designed to meet export restrictions, thus signaling the closing of an era that begun in 2010 when Intel opened its first chip plant in China.

While competition generally quickens innovation, trade bans often increases prices, so tomorrow’s computers might be surprisingly more expensive. Readers wanting to know more about the conflict over computer chips can read about it in this book at Amazon.