The heads of top US chipmakers Intel, Qualcomm, Nvidia and possibly others plan to visit Washington next week to discuss the Biden administration’s chip policies in regard to China, sources say.
The chief executive officers plan to lobby top officials against extending curbs on the sale of advanced computer chips to China – or advocating for any moves to be eased or delayed if the White House insists on further bans, sources said.
US officials are considering tightening export rules affecting high-performance computing chips and shipments to Huawei Technologies, sources said in June.
The rules would affect Intel, which is preparing a new artificial intelligence chip that could be shipped to China; Qualcomm, which has a licence to sell chips to Huawei, and Nvidia, which could be hit particularly hard by extended curbs.
Nvidia said in May it had modified its flagship H100 chip into a version that is legal to export to China. The company’s strong position in the AI chip market helped boost its worth to $1 trillion earlier this year.
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One of the sources familiar with the matter said the executives’ goals for the meetings would be to ensure that government officials understand the possible impact of any further tightening of rules around what chips can be sold to China.
Many US chip firms get more than one-fifth of their revenue from China, and industry executives have argued that reducing those sales would cut into profits that they reinvest into research and development.
The Biden administration issued sweeping export controls last October designed to freeze China’s semiconductor industry in place while the US pours billions of dollars in subsidies into its own chip industry.
But news emerged last month that US officials plan to implement fresh bans on sales of artificial intelligence (AI) chips to China by clamping down on the amount of computing power the chips can have.
The chip industry has been warmly received in Washington in recent years as lawmakers and the White House work to shift more production to the US and its allies, and away from China.
Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger and Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon have met often with government officials.
Next week’s meetings, which one of the sources said could include joint sessions between executives and US officials, come as Nvidia Corp and other chip companies fear a permanent loss of sales for an industry with large amounts of business in China while tensions escalate between Washington and Beijing.
Intel and Qualcomm declined to comment, while officials at the White House did not immediately return a request for comment.
The sources, who declined to be named because they were not authorized to talk to the media, said other semiconductor CEOs may also be in Washington next week.
- Reuters with additional editing by Jim Pollard
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