Since October 2022 the United States has required a licence to ship top-end AI accelerators to China. Nvidia’s A100, H100 and later chips, and the servers built around them, can’t legally go to Chinese buyers without one, and for most of that period licences were rarely granted. Demand didn’t go away. A grey market grew to fill it, and since 2025 US prosecutors have brought a run of cases showing how servers worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and in one case billions, were rerouted.

CoWoS (Chip-on-Wafer-on-Substrate) is TSMC’s method for placing a large processor and several stacks of high bandwidth memory side by side on a shared slab of silicon wiring, then mounting that slab on a package substrate. Almost every leading AI accelerator is built this way: Nvidia’s Blackwell and Rubin GPUs, AMD’s Instinct chips, Google’s TPUs and most custom chips designed with Broadcom or Marvell. For the past three years the number of CoWoS wafers TSMC could process each month has capped how many of those chips could ship, more often than the supply of leading-edge wafers did.

This page tracks the main US rules that limit China’s access to advanced chips, AI accelerators and chipmaking equipment. It starts with the October 2022 package and runs to the guidance Washington issued in 2026. Entries are in date order, and each one says what changed and who felt it. Last updated: 15 September 2026. How the controls work The Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) sits inside the US Commerce Department and writes the Export Administration Regulations (EAR).

Nvidia has committed five billion dollars to Safe Superintelligence, the Ilya Sutskever venture that had raised roughly three billion in total and carried a thirty-two billion dollar valuation last year. Nvidia’s own framing emphasizes that the investment comes with GPU access sufficient to raise SSI’s available compute by an order of magnitude. That second clause is the whole story, and the dollar figure obscures it. A single investor writing a check larger than a company’s entire prior funding history is unusual.

I’ve defended Micron against its rivals often enough that I don’t reach for the company’s press office as a source of good faith. Legacy chipmakers cry protectionism every time a customer finds a cheaper part, and most of the time the complaint is about margin, not national security. Every instinct I have says discount this warning too. I can’t. Not this time. Apple’s pitch to the Trump administration — sourcing Chinese memory for products sold outside the United States — has been framed as a carve-out, a geographic footnote that leaves the domestic industry untouched.

NVIDIA and Corning Incorporated have announced a multiyear partnership to scale U.S.-based optical connectivity manufacturing for AI infrastructure. The deal commits Corning to a tenfold expansion of its domestic optical connectivity manufacturing capacity, a greater than 50% increase in U.S. fiber production, and the construction of three new facilities across North Carolina and Texas — creating more than 3,000 jobs in the process. To understand why this matters, it helps to understand what optical connectivity actually is and where it sits in the AI infrastructure stack.

Something subtle but important is happening in the global AI landscape, and you could almost miss it if you only focus on the usual headlines about chips, models, and hyperscalers. At NVIDIA GTC 2026, Taiwan showed up not just as the world’s manufacturing backbone, but as an increasingly confident architect of full-stack AI systems. A delegation of 16 high-growth startups, organized through Startup Island TAIWAN’s Silicon Valley Hub with backing from the National Development Council, didn’t just exhibit—they embedded themselves into the ecosystem in a way that signals a shift in strategy.