 "One Biden decision Trump is not undoing: Tightening the curb on China tech")
In a rare move, US President Donald Trump has signalled that he would not just continue to take forward a key decision of the previous Joe Biden administration.
Bloomberg News has reported that the Trump administration is not just considering continuing the Biden administration’s tightening of the noose around China’s access to semiconductors but is in the processing of stepping up the campaign with new measures.
The development comes at a time when Trump is undoing not just Biden’s decisions but generations of US policy positions by abandoning alliances, embracing Russia, and becoming a revanchist expansionist regime that’s committed to annexing sovereign nations and territories in at least three continents.
Trump roping in allies against China: Report
The Trump administration has held meetings with Japanese and Dutch governments in restricting Tokyo Electron and ASML from maintaining semiconductor gear in China, according to Bloomberg.
Similar curbs are already imposed on US companies such as Lam Research, KLA, and Applied Material.
The efforts were started by the previous Biden administration and Trump administration appears to have taken from where the Biden administration left.
The Trump administration is also considered targeted sanctions specific to companies. Currently, semiconductor giant Nvidia needs a licence to sell most advanced chips to China, but the Trump administration wants to control the export of even lesser advanced Nvidia chips to China that are allowed to be exported currently without a licence, according to Bloomberg.
People aware of the matter were quoted as saying in the report that such curbs are also being considered globally beyond China.
The news led to Tokyo Electron’s shares falling by nearly 5 per cent and Nvidia seeing a 1 per cent decline on Tuesday.
Impact Shorts
More ShortsAs part of the companies-specific actions, the Trump administration is considering blocking Chinese memory chipmaker ChangXin Memory’s from buying US technology, according to the report.
The crackdown on ChangXin Memory was starteed by the Biden adminstration but could not be finalised because of opposition from Japan.
The report further said that the Trump administration is considering intensifying restrictions on SMIC, which majorly supplies chips to Huawei. The Biden administration had blocked most SMIC shipments but had allowed others after a case-by-casis review, but the Trump adminstration is reported to be considering its extension.
What’s behind US crackdown on China’s access to chips?
Calls for the intensification of crackdown on China’s access to chips made by Nvidia and other Western companies have been made following the recent advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) systems in China.
Last month, Chinese firms DeepSeek shocked the world with its model R1 that was claimed to be better than OpenAI’s at a fraction of the cost — DeepSeek claimed to have used $5.6 million compared to OpenAI’s $540 million.
While China’s access to most advanced chips is already curtained, market watchers have said that recent Chinese advancements have been driven by the use of H20 chips of Nvidia that are permissible for export to China. Hence, the Trump administration is preparing to extend export control to these type of chips too.
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