The Chinese tech giant Alibaba (NYSE: BABA) Group Holding Ltd. can’t buy some of the most advanced chip designs because the U.S. and Britain won’t give licences to export technology to China, the Financial Times reported on Wednesday. SoftBank owns the British chip technology company Arm Ltd.
People who know about the situation told the report that this is the first time Arm has decided it can’t send its most cutting-edge designs to China.
The British chip technology company decided that the U.S. and UK would not let it sell its latest Neoverse V series because the performance was too high, the report said.
Reuters asked Alibaba and Arm for a comment, but neither company answered right away.
Two months ago, the U.S. published a wide-ranging set of export controls that included a plan to cut China off from certain semiconductor chips made anywhere in the world with U.S. tools. This greatly increased the U.S.’s ability to slow Beijing’s technological and military progress.
Bloomberg News reported on Tuesday that the Biden administration plans to put Yangtze Memory Technologies and 35 other Chinese companies on a trade blacklist that would stop them from buying certain American parts.
Arm released Neoverse V2, the next generation of its data centre chip technology, earlier this year to keep up with the rapid growth of data from 5G and internet-connected devices.
In the past year, Arm has released several new core designs, such as Neoverse N2, Neoverse V1, and Neoverse V2. The report said that Neoverse V2 is the most powerful core to date.
Chinese companies can’t buy Neoverse V2 or its older version, V1, because of U.S. and UK export controls on technologies listed under Wassenaar. This is an agreement that limits the movement of “dual-use” technologies that can be used for both peaceful and military purposes, FT said, citing people who were briefed on the decision.
