NEW YORK, Oct 8 — Companies around the world yesterday began to wrestle with the impact of wide-ranging US curbs on selling chips and chip manufacturing equipment to China.
The sweeping rules have hit chip stocks, with the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index falling nearly 6 per cent by the end of the day. American semiconductor equipment makers Lam Research Corp, Applied Materials Inc and KLA Corp were all down more than 4 per cent.
Applied Materials said it was assessing the new rules, while Lam and KLA did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
South Korean memory chip maker SK Hynix Inc said yesterday it would seek a license under new US export control rules for equipment to keep operating its factories in China.
American officials yesterday published a sweeping set of rules that restrict the export of some US-made semiconductor manufacturing equipment to China, but provided exemptions for companies from the United States and its allies to seek a license.
“SK Hynix is ready to make its utmost efforts to get the US government’s license and will closely work with the Korean government for this,” the company said in a statement. “We’re also ready to operate our fabrication plants in China smoothly, while complying with the international order.”
Officials yesterday also introduced rules against selling a broad swath of chips for any use in “supercomputer” systems in China. Supercomputers can be used in developing nuclear weapons and other military technologies. US companies Nvidia Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc both said last month they had been told to stop exporting their top-tier chips to China.
The rules define a supercomputer as any system with 100 or more petaflops of so-called double precision computing power, or 200-plus petaflops of single precision computing power, within a 41,600 cubic feet area. A petaflop is a measure of a computer’s processing speed.
Nvidia, which said last month the rules could affect US$400 million (RM1.8 billion) of its current-quarter sales in China, said yesterday it did not expect any further impact on its business.
“These regulations impose on the broader industry controls on processors meeting certain thresholds that we were already subject to. We don’t expect the new controls, including restrictions on sales for highly dense systems, to have a material impact on our business,” the company said in a statement.
AMD did not respond to a request for comment. — Reuters
