This is entirely unsurprising. China, while being much weaker militarily (as well as in every other way) and having no chance of catching up at any point this century, is the main geopolitical rival of the US and a major destabilizing factor in Asia, a region that has become an increasingly large focus of the US as it slowly disentangles itself from Europe (and Europe from it). For all of its follies (LLMs and image generation mainly), AI in general and AI chips in particular are of enormous and growing military, scientific and economic importance.
If there is one major war that is increasingly likely to happen, it’s going to be a direct clash between China and the US over Taiwan, possibly very soon (likely hoping to exploit the chaos and incompetence of the coming Trump administration) given the preparation we are starting to see at the mainland Chinese coast facing Taiwan. We are also already seeing AI-powered drones being deployed in Ukraine totally changing the nature of warfare (like a large number of German drones recently supplied to Ukraine that can identify and attack targets on their own without any human input, making them jam-proof) and, as mentioned in the article, AI chips can be used for a wide variety of military-related tasks, so it’s unsurprising that America is restricting supply of a critical technology to the one country that will most likely start a war with them soon, similar to how the aggressive expansionist Japanese Empire was heavily sanctioned prior to Pearl Harbor. China appears to be hell-bent on repeating the mistakes Japan made, including possibly by trying to perform a - what they hope to be, but is unlikely to work - crippling first strike on US military assets at the start of the invasion. Preventing them from using AI technology more advanced than what the US has access to in any of this is vital in maintaining the considerable gap in capabilities between the Chinese and American military.
Even if China suddenly had the most advanced AI technology in the world (which is highly unlikely to ever happen, given the inherent R&D disadvantages totalitarian dictatorships suffer from), the gap would still be massive, but no nation is interested in a fair fight or letting the enemy close any gap in capabilities, so the US will be using any chance they can get to keep things unbalanced in their favor, including their vastly superior soft power. China is in the unfortunate position of being far more reliant on the US (and the global trade that is enabled by the American hegemony) than the other way around, which means they can only ever react to American actions against them. Yes, they control a large supply of the planet’s easily accessible rare Earth reserves, which are vital to chip making, but they can’t afford to cut the world off from it given the increasingly dire state of their economy that no amount of falsified figures can hide at this point, not even domestically, so any export restrictions they can enact in response will always be little more than attempts at saving face, an irrational concept that is driving too much of their decision making to their own detriment.
Before I sound too authoritative on this complex topic, this is just my personal opinion based on what little I know. Feel free to pick this apart.
This is a direct consequence of the so-called ‘multipolar world’ imo, and the aggression demonstrated by dictatorships like China and Russia. Not that I think this is good, it’s a bad development, though other areas and countries do and will increasingly to the same in the future. I guess the democratic world -or the rest of it- has no choice other than that.
It may be a modern version of the multilateral export controls we already had during the Cold War in the 20th century.