TSMC Tightens Chip Export Rules for China Amid U.S. Sanctions

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), one of the world’s largest chipmakers, has imposed new restrictions on supplying advanced Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) to China, according to a report by PhoneArena.

In November last year, a TSMC-manufactured chip was detected in an AI processor developed by Huawei. Following a request from the United States, the company halted the supply of AI chips to China. Under U.S. export restrictions, chips manufactured with seven-nanometer or more advanced technology cannot be exported to China.

On January 31 this year, TSMC implemented even stricter regulations. Now, any chip designed with sixteen-nanometer or more advanced technology by a Chinese fabless company (which designs chips without its own manufacturing facilities) must go through a U.S.-approved third-party packaging facility before being sold.

According to the latest U.S. restrictions, exporting chips containing more than thirty billion transistors requires approval from the U.S. Department of Commerce. However, TSMC’s new policy is even stricter than U.S. regulations, as it now prohibits the direct export of sixteen-nanometer chips to China.

China’s DeepSeek-R1 artificial intelligence model reportedly used 2,048 NVIDIA H800 GPUs for training. These chips contain eighty billion transistors and are built on four-nanometer technology, making them ineligible for export to China under U.S. restrictions. However, there are speculations that DeepSeek acquired the chips through a Singapore-based intermediary. The matter is currently under investigation by U.S. intelligence agencies and government authorities.

While companies like Apple, AMD, Intel, and MediaTek can obtain advanced chips with special authorization, AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA now require approval to export even their previously permitted standard GPUs to China.