Officials at the US Commerce Department have reportedly written draft regulations that would restrict AI chip shipments to anywhere in the world without American approval, giving Washington broad control over whether other countries can build facilities for training and running artificial-intelligence models, and under what conditions.
The proposed regulations would require companies to seek U.S. permission for virtually all exports of AI accelerators from the likes of Nvidia (NVDA) and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), a global expansion of curbs that currently cover around 40 countries, Bloomberg News reported, citing people familiar with the matter.
These chips are the most coveted components in the tech world. Companies like OpenAI (OPENAI) and Alphabet (GOOG) (GOOGL) buy them by the thousands to install in data centers that run services like ChatGPT and Gemini.
Shares of Nvidia (NVDA) and AMD (AMD) fell to session lows on the news Thursday. Nvidia dropped as much as 1.9%, while AMD declined 2.3%.
President Donald Trump’s team has said repeatedly that they want the world to use American AI, and the draft rules aren’t meant to function as an Nvidia (NVDA) export ban. Rather, the regulation would set up the U.S. government as gatekeeper for the AI industry: Companies — and in some cases, their governments — would have to seek the blessing of the U.S. Commerce Department to buy the precious accelerators, the report added.
For truly massive deployments — more than 200,000 of Nvidia’s GB300 GPUs owned by one company in one country — the host government would have to get involved. The US would only approve such exports to allies that make stringent security promises and “matching” investments in American AI, the report said, noting that the draft rule doesn’t specify an investment ratio.