The United States is preparing to block China's overseas channel for renting AI chips, with seven countries including Singapore added to the targeted list, specifically targeting NVIDIA's top-tier Blackwell chips.

Insight Beating AI Flash News: The Trump administration is finalizing new AI chip export control rules, set to restrict Chinese AI firms from remotely using advanced chips like NVIDIA’s Blackwell via overseas data centers. The new rules could be announced as early as this month and are still undergoing inter-agency coordination. The rules will add Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Norway, Brazil, and South Africa to a stricter chip export licensing regime. Data centers operated by non-U.S. local firms will need to apply to the U.S. for licenses to import controlled AI chips such as NVIDIA’s Blackwell and the latest Rubin, while disclosing equipment recipients and end uses, and will be subject to ongoing supervision. Data centers operated by U.S. firms will receive conditional exemptions. As long as they ban remote use of the relevant advanced chips by countries subject to U.S. arms embargoes like China and Russia, these data centers do not need to apply for separate licenses for importing such chips. However, they still must report the identities of clients from those countries and the scale of computing power they use. Previously, Chinese AI firms could not directly import some advanced chips, but they still rented GPU computing power via overseas data centers. Recently, NVIDIA was reportedly requiring overseas cloud service providers to allocate at least 51% of their services to non-Chinese clients, and Oracle was also reported to have canceled a roughly $7 billion computing power lease with Tencent under U.S. government pressure. The U.S. now plans to directly restrict overseas data centers from providing advanced computing power to Chinese firms through export licenses and client reporting systems. Facing the risk of tightened policies, Chinese cloud service providers and AI labs are stepping up bookings for overseas NVIDIA computing power.