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Chinese firms to incur higher costs for deploying advanced AI chips from US: analysts
‘Beijing has made it politically unpalatable for private firms to rely too much on imported AI chips,’ EIU senior analyst Chim Lee says
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Wency Chenin Shanghai
Chinese companies are expected to shoulder higher costs for deploying advanced chips from the US, owing to a new 25 per cent tariff imposed by Washington on select high-performance semiconductors, according to analysts.
The administration of US President Donald Trump on Wednesday said the new import duties on advanced artificial intelligence chips covered Nvidia’s H200 and Advanced Micro Devices’ MI325X graphics processing units, as well as their equivalent products and derivatives.
According to the White House directive, US reliance on foreign semiconductor supply chains posed a national security and economic risk.
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The new tariff appeared to encourage increased domestic chip production and reduce US dependence on foreign manufacturing hubs such as Taiwan. This implied that chips made by contract foundries, such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co, could not be shipped directly to mainland China, but must first be routed through the US.
The directive was announced a day after the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS), under the US Department of Commerce, gave a conditional approval for Nvidia to sell its H200 chips in China. The US required every H200 shipment to undergo independent, third-party testing in the US to verify performance specifications before export.
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“Essentially, we could be seeing the long-discussed 25 per cent US government ‘cut’ on H200 and MI325X revenue being put into practice,” said Chim Lee, a senior analyst at the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU).
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