Yesterday, President Joe Biden announced new export restrictions on AI chips with US technology for data center use. Malaysia, Singapore, Israel and the UAE are the countries that have been placed in the Tier 2 category that is subject to computing power limits.
This morning, the White House explained that Tier 2 countries are only given a purchase quota of 50,000 of the latest GPUs. This is a small quota because xAI alone has over 100,000 NVIDIA GPUs on their Colossus supercomputer with plans to upgrade to 1 million GPUs in the future.
Tier 2 countries will also need to apply for a license before purchases are allowed. The GPU quota for Tier 2 countries can be increased to 100,000 of the latest GPUs if cooperation between their governments and the US government is carried out. Tier 2 countries only need to coordinate their export controls, clean energy use and technology security with the US.
The White House, however, said that purchases of up to 1,700 advanced GPUs alone do not require a license and are not included in the Tier 2 quota calculation. This is because small-scale purchases are usually for educational, medical and research institutions.
Malaysia does not need to worry about its dream of becoming a regional data center being affected because Microsoft, Google and Amazon are allowed to build AI data centers in Tier 2 countries without GPU quota limits, just like in Tier 1 countries.
But US-based companies are only allowed to place 50% of their computing power overseas. They are also not allowed to place more than 25% of their computing power outside of a Tier 1 country and a maximum of 7% of their computing power in a single Tier 2 country.