The Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security is drafting a new rule to stop Chinese AI firms from renting access to US-made GPU computing power through data centers in third countries such as Thailand and Singapore, The Information reported.
The draft rule could be shared with industry as early as September, though export-control lawyers have warned that BIS may lack statutory authority for remote-access controls without amendments to the Export Control Reform Act. The effort comes after OSTP director Michael Kratsios publicly alleged that Chinese AI lab Moonshot trained its Kimi K3 model on Nvidia GB300 servers located in Thailand — a case cited as the impetus for the new rule.
Chinese AI companies have increasingly turned to renting GPU compute in Southeast Asian and other offshore data centers to circumvent US export controls that restrict direct sales of advanced AI chips to China. The practice allows Chinese firms to access cutting-edge Nvidia hardware without the chips ever physically entering Chinese territory.
The proposed rule would represent a significant expansion of US export controls, extending them from physical chip sales to remote computational access. It follows a series of increasingly strict restrictions on AI chip exports to China, including the October 2022 and October 2023 rules that limited sales of Nvidia's most advanced GPUs.
The initiative faces legal and practical challenges. Proving that a specific remote computation session is being accessed by a Chinese entity from third-country data centers would require new monitoring capabilities. Industry groups have also raised concerns about the precedent of controlling access to computing power based on the end user's nationality, regardless of where the computing physically takes place.
