A new SAFE Chips Act proposed by a bipartisan group aims to lock current export rules into law, preventing AMD and Nvidia from selling any AI accelerators based on the latest architectures to China for the next 30 months and forcing companies to compete with H20 and MI308 against China's latest AI processors.
A bipartisan group of U.S. senators has introduced new legislation designed to lock in the existing export control rules on AI and HPC processors from companies like AMD and Nvidia to China and other "adversary" nations for 30 months. If the Secure and Feasible Exports of Chips Act of 2025 (SAFE Chips Act) passes, then the current GPUs tailored for China — AMD's MI308 and Nvidia's H20 — will be the best processors these companies can supply to China and other foes for the next 30 months.
The proposed definition of an advanced processor mirrors technical thresholds used in the U.S. Commerce Department's existing ECCN 3A090/4A090 controls, which means that an export license is required for any device specifically listed under the ECCN 3A090/4A090 controls (e.g., B300, B200, H200, H100, A100, etc.), or that exceeds specific performance parameters. A processor is considered advanced if it meets one of the preset parameters that include total processing performance (TPP score is listed as processing power multiplied by the length of operation), performance density (PD counted by dividing TPP by the die area measured in square millimeters), memory bandwidth, interconnect bandwidth, or combined memory and interconnect bandwidth.
The bill excludes consumer and gaming hardware not designed or marketed for data centers from the regulation, allowing AMD and Nvidia to sell their highest-end consumer GPUs to adversary countries as long as they are not listed in the ECCN 3A090/4A090 regulations.
Specific performance metrics mentioned in the new (or not so new?) export control rules are as follows:
Total processing performance ≥ 4,800
TPP ≥ 2,400 with performance density ≥ 1.6
TPP ≥ 1,600 with performance density ≥ 3.2
Total DRAM bandwidth ≥ 4,100 GB/s
Interconnect bandwidth ≥ 1,100 GB/s
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