The recent growth in demand for training Large Language Models (LLMs) like Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) has sparked the interest of many companies to invest in GPU solutions that are used to train these models. However, countries like China have struggled with US sanctions, and NVIDIA has to create custom models that meet US export regulations. Carrying two GPUs, H800 and A800, they represent cut-down versions of the original H100 and A100, respectively. We reported about H800; however, it remained as mysterious as A800 that we are talking about today. Thanks to MyDrivers, we have information that the A800 GPU performance is within 70% of the regular A100.

The regular A100 GPU manages 9.7 TeraFLOPs of FP64, 19.5 TeraFLOPS of FP64 Tensor, and up to 624 BF16/FP16 TeraFLOPS with sparsity. A rough napkin math would suggest that 70% performance of the original (a 30% cut) would equal 6.8 TeraFLOPs of FP64 precision, 13.7 TeraFLOPs of FP64 Tensor, and 437 BF16/FP16 TeraFLOPs with sparsity. MyDrivers notes that A800 can be had for 100,000 Yuan, translating to about 14,462 USD at the time of writing. This is not the most capable GPU that Chinese companies can acquire, as H800 exists. However, we don't have any information about its performance for now.

Rather unexpectedly, a mostly unknown Chinese company called PowerLeader—who seems to have mainly been in the server market space until now—has launched an unheard of x86 compatible CPU. There's no product information on the company website, not even a press release on the CPU which was announced only yesterday according to IT Home. Fortunately, there's a picture of the new CPU, which gives us a few more details. The CPU appears to be called the Pstar P3 and has the model name P3-01105. Luckily the clock frequency of the CPU, which is 3.7 GHz, is also printed on the chip.

However, a closer look at the picture would have most people that are interested in tech scratching their heads, as it appears to be an Intel CPU using the LGA-1200 socket. Even the model name and what is supposedly the spec ID of the CPU, follows Intel's style of naming its CPUs. The comments on IT Home and elsewhere, all suggest that this is simply a re-branded Intel Core i3-10105 CPU, although it's entirely possible this is a chip that only looks like an Intel CPU. It's entirely possible that this is some kind of unannounced licensing deal by Intel, but if so, it would be the first such licensing deal Intel has done since the 286 days, to our knowledge. PowerLeader claims that the CPU is specifically designed for desktop computers and the company is expecting to sell 1.5 million units per year.

AMD is reported to be reissuing its old Zen+ (12 nm) tech in order to meet demand for cheaper, lower-end systems in China, according to information released by Board Channels this week. The insider source claims that a new production order has been placed for Ryzen 3000G series APUs (requesting up to 30,000 units) and these processors are likely to be sold as part of hardware bundles with (similar vintage) low-end AM4-based motherboards - for example the B450 and A320 series, these older boards are still popular budget choices in China and readily available. The leak does not mention whether AMD is choosing to issue completely new hardware or if it is simply reproducing its 2019-era SKUs.

AMD released two Ryzen 3000G models back in 2019 - the 3400G and 3200G, both are quad-core Picasso APUs although the latter is lacking in simultaneous multithreading. It is not clear whether the super low budget AMD Athlon 3000G model will be included as part of the alleged 30K unit order. The 3000G series' onboard iGPUs (based on AMD's first generation Vega architecture) are likely preferred by the budget-conscious buyer since a discrete graphics card is not an essential part of builds intended for an office setting or a simple/functional home computer setup.

Last October, the US Department of Commerce imposed semiconductor restrictions on Chinese imports of equipment for processes of 18 nm and below. SK hynix's Wuxi fab was granted a one-year production license, but geopolitical risks and weak demand prompted the company to reduce wafer starts by about 30% per month in 2Q23, according to TrendForce's latest research.

TrendForce reports that SK hynix had planned to transition its Wuxi fab's mainstream process from 1Y nm to 1Z nm, decreasing the output of legacy processes. However, due to limitations imposed by the US ban, the company instead opted to increase the share of its 21 nm production lines, focus-ing on DDR3 and DDR4 4Gb products. SK hynix's long-term strategy involves shifting its capacity expansion back to South Korea, while the Wuxi fab caters to domestic demand in China and the legacy-process consumer DRAM market.

AMD is late in releasing its Phoenix Zen 4 lineup of mobile APUs - the original April launch has been missed, and laptops bearing Ryzen 7000HS & H-series are expected to arrive at some point this month. Preview hardware has made its way into the hands of testers, and one particular outlet - Golden Pig Upgrade, a content creator on the Chinese Bilibili video site - has performed benchmark tests. He seems to be the first reviewer to get hands-on time with AMD Ryzen 7040 Phoenix APUs, and his findings point to class leading performance results in terms of graphical capabilities - the 7840HS (packing a Radeon 780M RDNA3 iGPU) is compared to the Rembrandt-based 7735H, as well as a pair of Intel Raptor Lake CPUs - the 13700H and 13500H models.

AMD's newest Phoenix APU is the group leader in GPU performance stakes, but the jump up from the last-gen Rembrandt (RDNA2 iGPU) chip is not all that significant. VideoCardz reckons that the Radeon 780M integrated GPU is roughly equivalent to an NVIDIA GeForce MX550 dGPU and not far off from a GeForce GTX 1650 Max-Q graphics card (in terms of benchmark performance). According to AMD's internal documentation the RDNA 3 core architecture utilized in Phoenix APUs is referred to as "2.5" so this perhaps explains why the 780M is not doing laps around its older silbing(s).

According to a recent news article released by Chinese news group Sina Technology, NetEase has filed a lawsuit against its former publishing partner Blizzard Entertainment, to the tune of (around) $43.5 Million. The Chinese Internet technology company is seeking compensation, in the form of a very large refund, following Blizzard's total exit from the nation's online gaming sector - its server infrastructure in China was shut down in January of this year. The closing of Blizzard-related services represented a very abrupt end to a 14-year long relationship between the two online gaming specialists - press coverage at the time presented a tense situation involving many major disagreements - the partnership was broken because of unfavorable terms on Blizzard's part.

NetEase posits that it had to compensate its customer base through refunds from its own reserves, after the sudden shutdown of Blizzard's hugely popular MMO - World of Warcraft, and other online multiplayer game series including Overwatch, Hearthstone, Diablo and Starcraft. A significant chunk of the $43.5 million settlement is said to cover the company's cost in refunding part of its customer base - somewhere in the range of 1.12 million players - for discontinued games and services. NetEase is also reported to be seeking damages for broken license agreements, unsold merchandise inventory and the loss of access to future Blizzard intellectual properties.

Update Apr 25th: According to an article from PC Gamer, published today, NetEase is not taking Blizzard to court. It turns out that a serial litigator, Yang Jun, has included NetEase as an appellant in his filed legal documents - under another company name, The9, an apparently defunct former licensing partner. PC Gamer has been informed that Yang Jun has sued NetEase in the past, and that his latest batch of legal documents have been amended to reflect that he is the lone party in demanding a financial settlement from Blizzard.

According to the South China Morning Post (SCMP) sources, Yangtze Memory Technologies Corp (YMTC) has been plotting to manufacture its advanced 3D NAND flash using locally sourced equipment. As the source notes, YMTC has placed big orders from local equipment makers in a secret project codenamed Wudangshan, named after the Taoist mountain in the company's home province of Hubei. Last year, YTMC announced significant progress towards creating 200+ layer 3D NAND flash before other 3D NAND makers like Micron and SK Hynix. Called X3-9070, the chip is a 232-layer 3D NAND based on the company's advanced Xtacking 3.0 architecture.

As the SCMP finds, YTMC has placed big orders at Beijing-based Naura Technology Group, maker of etching tools and competitor to Lam Research, to manufacture its advanced flash memory. Additionally, YTMC has reportedly asked all its tool suppliers to remove all logos and other marks from equipment to avoid additional US sanctions holding the development back. This significant order block comes after the state invested 7 billion US Dollars into YTMC to boost its production capacity, and we see the company utilizing those resources right away. However, few industry analysts have identified a few "choke points" in YTMC's path to independent manufacturing, as there are still no viable domestic alternatives to US-based tool makers in areas such as metrology tools, where KLA is the dominant player, and lithography tools, where ASML, Nikon, and Canon, are noteworthy. The Wuhan-based Wudangshan project remains secret about dealing with those choke points in the future.

Earlier this month, it was reported that the Chinese Government could retaliate to the U.S. ban on YMTC by banning Idaho-based Micron Technology from selling memory products to Chinese firms—something that can severely hit Micron's bottom-line if you consider the various smartphone brands and PC OEMs based out of China, not to mention foreign companies that manufacture the entire spectrum of consumer electronics in China.

While Beijing is still making up its mind on whether go ahead with this ban, Washington threw a wrench in the works, by "urging" South Korean memory giants Samsung and SK Hynix not to fill the shortfall in supply left by a ban on Micron. It stands to reason that a similar request has been made with Kioxia, which is majority-owned by Bain Capital. Therefore, if China were to ban Micron, it would have to do so only after scaling up production at YMTC to make up for the supply, or end up with a chip shortage that can hurt Chinese ICT and PC firms in the immediate aftermath of the ban.

TrendForce reports that the US Department of Commerce recently released details regarding its CHIPS and Science Act, which stipulates that beneficiaries of the act will be restricted in their investment activities—for more advanced and mature processes—in China, North Korea, Iran, and Russia for the next ten years. The scope of restrictions in this updated legislation will be far more extensive than the previous export ban, further reducing the willingness of multinational semiconductor companies to invest in China for the next decade.

CHIPS Act will mainly impact TSMC; and as the decoupling of the supply chain continues, VIS and PSMC capture orders rerouted from Chinese foundries
In recent years, the US has banned semiconductor exports and passed the CHIPS Act, all to ensure supply chains decoupling from China. Initially, bans on exports were primarily focused on non-planar transistor architecture (16/14 nm and more advanced processes). However, Japan and the Netherlands have also announced that they intend to join the sanctions, which means key DUV immersion systems, used for producing both sub-16 nm and 40/28 nm mature processes, are likely to be included within the scope of the ban as well. These developments, in conjunction with the CHIPS Act, mean that the expansion of both Chinese foundries and multinational foundries in China will be suppressed to varying degrees—regardless of whether they are advanced or mature processes.

Last Tuesday, Alibaba announced its intentions to put out its own artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot product called Tongyi Qianwen - another rival to take on OpenAI's pioneering ChatGPT natural language processing tool. The Chinese technology giant is hoping to retrofit the new chatbot system into several arms of its business operations. Alibaba had revealed initial plans for chatbot integration earlier this year, and mentioned that it was providing an alternative to the already well established ChatGPT tool. Alibaba's workplace messaging application - DingTalk - is slated to receive the first AI-powered update in the near future, although the company did not provide a firm timeline for Tongyi Qianwen's release window.

The product name "Tongyi Qianwen" loosely translates to "seeking an answer by asking a thousand questions" - Alibaba did not provide an official English language translation at last week's press conference. Their chatbot is reported to function in both Mandarin and English language modes. Advanced AI voice recognition is set for usage in the Tmall Genie range of smart speakers (similar in function to the Amazon Echo). Alibaba expects to expand Tongyi Qianwen's reach into applications relating to e-commerce and mapping services.

Amid the push for technology independence, Chinese companies are pushing out more products to satisfy the need for the rapidly soaring demand for domestic data processing silicon. Today, we have information that Chinese Loongson has launched a 3D5000 CPU with as many as 32 cores. Utilizing chiplet technology, the 3D5000 represents a combination of two 16-core 3C5000 processors based on LA464 cores, based on LoongArch ISA that follows the combination of RISC and MIPS ISA design principles. The new chip features 64 MB of L3 cache, supports eight-channel DDR4-3200 ECC memory achieving 50 GB/s, and has five HyperTransport (HT) 3.0 interfaces. The TDP configuration of the chip is officially 300 Watts; however, normal operation is usually at around 150 Watts, with LA464 cores running at 2 GHz.

Scaling of the new chip goes beyond the chiplet, and pours over into system, as 3D5000 supports 2P and 4P configurations, where a single motherboard can become a system of up to 128 cores. To connect them, Loongson uses a 7A2000 bridge chip that is reportedly 400% faster than the previous solution, although we have no information about the last chip bridge. Based on the LGA-4129 package, the chip size is 75.4x58.5×6.5 mm. Regarding performance, Loongson compares it to the average Arm chip that goes into smartphones and claims that its designs are up to four times faster. In SPEC2006, performance reaches 425 points, while maintaining a single TeraFLOP at dual-precision 64-bit format. On the other hand, the processor was built for security, as the chip has a custom hardware-baked security to prevent Spectre and Meltdown, has an on-package Trusted Platform Module (TPM), and has a secret China-made security algorithm with an embedded custom security module that does encryption and decryption at 5 Gbps.

NVIDIA is stepping up to manufacturers of counterfeit graphics card in China according to an article published by MyDrivers - the hardware giant is partnering up with a number of the nation's major e-commerce companies in order to eliminate inventories of bogus GPUs. It is claimed that these online retail platforms, including JD.com and Douyin, are partway into removing a swathe of dodgy stock from their listings. NVIDIA is seeking to disassociate itself from the pool of unlicensed hardware and the brands responsible for flooding the domestic and foreign markets with so-called fake graphics cards. The company is reputed to be puzzled about the murky origins of this bootlegging of their patented designs.

The market became saturated with fake hardware during the Ethereum mining boom - little known cottage companies such as 51RSIC, Corn, Bingying and JieShuoMllse were pushing rebadged cheap OEM cards to domestic e-tail sites. The knock-off GPUs also crept outside of that sector, and import listings started to appear on international platforms including Ebay, AliExpress, Amazon and Newegg. NVIDIA is also fighting to stop the sale of refurbished cards - these are very likely to have been utilized in intensive cryptocurrency mining activities. A flood of these hit the market following an extreme downturn in crypto mining efforts, and many enthusiast communities have warned against acquiring pre-owned cards due to the high risk of component failure.

According to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Enterprise Infrastructure Tracker: Buyer and Cloud Deployment, spending on compute and storage infrastructure products for cloud deployments, including dedicated and shared IT environments, increased 16.3% year over year in the fourth quarter of 2022 (4Q22) to $24.1 billion. Spending on cloud infrastructure continues to outgrow the non-cloud segment although the latter had strong growth in 4Q22 as well, increasing 9.4% year over year to $18.7 billion. For the full year, cloud infrastructure grew 19.4% to $87.7 billion, while non-cloud grew 13.6% to $66.7 billion. The market continues to benefit from high demand, large backlogs, rising prices, and an improving infrastructure supply chain.

Although NAND suppliers have continued to roll back production, there is still an oversupply of NAND Flash as demand for products such as servers, smartphones, and notebooks is still too weak. Therefore, TrendForce predicts that the ASP of NAND Flash will continue to fall in 2Q23, though that decline may shrink to 5~10%. The key to supply and demand returning to a market equilibrium lies in whether NAND suppliers can cut back on production even more. TrendForce believes if demand remains stable, then the ASP of NAND Flash will have an opportunity to rebound in 4Q23; if demand is weaker than expected, then ASP will take longer to recover.

Client SSD: Currently, PC OEM's have managed to liquidate most of their component inventory, and are now gearing up in preparation for mid-year sales events. Suppliers are cutting prices to clear out their inventories of PCIe Gen 3 SSDs, which are gradually being phased out. Meanwhile, prices of PCIe Gen 4 SSDs continue to face downward pressure due to a slow intake of new customer orders. The continuous decline of QLC products in 1Q23 has also dragged down the prices of TLC products, and there is relatively little room for prices to keep falling in 2Q23. While it still remains unclear whether or not demand will recover, TrendForce projects that the prices of PC client SSDs will drop 5~10% in 2Q23.

NVIDIA's H100 accelerator is one of the most powerful solutions for powering AI workloads. And, of course, every company and government wants to use it to power its AI workload. However, in countries like China, shipment of US-made goods is challenging. With export regulations in place, NVIDIA had to get creative and make a specific version of its H100 GPU for the Chinese market, labeled the H800 model. Late last year, NVIDIA also created a China-specific version of the A100 model called A800, with the only difference being the chip-to-chip interconnect bandwidth being dropped from 600 GB/s to 400 GB/s.

This year's H800 SKU also features similar restrictions, and the company appears to have made similar sacrifices for shipping its chips to China. From the 600 GB/s bandwidth of the regular H100 PCIe model, the H800 is gutted to only 300 GB/s of bi-directional chip-to-chip interconnect bandwidth speed. While we have no data if the CUDA or Tensor core count has been adjusted, the sacrifice of bandwidth to comply with export regulations will have consequences. As the communication speed is reduced, training large models will increase the latency and slow the workload compared to the regular H100 chip. This is due to the massive data size that needs to travel from one chip to another. According to Reuters, an NVIDIA spokesperson declined to discuss other differences, stating that "our 800 series products are fully compliant with export control regulations."

According to TrendForce's latest survey of the global foundry market, electronics brands began adjusting their inventories in 2Q22, but foundries were unable to rapidly adapt to this development because they reside in the more upper portion of the supply chain. Moreover, revising procurement quantities of long-term foundry contracts takes time as well. Hence, only some tier-2 and -3 foundries were able to immediately respond to the changes in their clients' demand. Also, among them, 8-inch wafer foundries made a more pronounced reduction in their capacity utilization rates. As for the remaining foundries, the downward corrections that they made to their capacity utilization rates did not become noticeable until 4Q22. Hence, in 4Q22, the quarterly total revenue of the global top 10 foundries registered a QoQ decline for the first time after 13 consecutive quarters of positive growth. The quarterly total revenue of the top 10 foundries came to US$33,530 million, reflecting a drop of 4.7% from 3Q22. Moving into 1Q23, TrendForce projects that the quarterly total revenue of the top 10 will show an even steeper drop on account of seasonality and the uncertain macroeconomic situation.

Intel in February launched a couple of China-exclusive 13th Gen Core SKUs to highly optimize their price-performance for the PC gaming crowd there. These included the Core i5-13490F (6P+4E but with 24 MB L3 cache), and Core i7-13790F (8P+8E but with 33 MB L3 cache). In the wake of increased competition from AMD with its non-X Ryzen 5 7600, Ryzen 7 7700, and price-adjustments for its 7600X and 7700X, Intel is giving these SKUs slight price cuts. The i5-13490F launched at ¥1,599 (roughly $230), but is now retailing for ¥1,499 (roughly $200). There's no word on if these SKUs will launch outside China. The idea behind them is to increase the L3 cache sizes without touching the core-counts or clock-speeds, to improve cache-sensitive gaming performance. These chips are packaged in special "dark" retail boxes as shown below.

NVIDIA's presence in high-performance computing has steadily increased, with various workloads benefiting from the company's AI and HPC accelerator GPUs. One of the important markets for the company is China, and export regulations are about to complicate NVIDIA's business dealing with the country. NVIDIA's major partners in the Asia Pacific region are Inspur and Huawei, which make servers powered by A100 and H100 GPU solutions. Amid the latest Biden Administration complications, the US is considering limiting more export of US-designed goods to Chinese entities. Back in 2019, the US blacklisted Huawei and restricted the sales of the latest GPU hardware to the company. Last week, the Biden Administration also blacklisted Inspur, the world's third-largest server maker.

In the Morgan Stanley conference, NVIDIA's Chief Financial Officer Colette Cress noted that: "Inspur is a partner for us, when we indicate a partner, they are helping us stand up computing for the end customers. As we work forward, we will probably be working with other partners, for them to stand-up compute within the Asia-Pac region or even other parts of the world. But again, our most important focus is focusing on the law and making sure that we follow export controls very closely. So in this case, we will look in terms of other partners to help us." This indicates that NVIDIA will lose millions of dollars in revenue due to the inability to sell its GPUs to partners like Inspur. As the company stated, complying with the export regulations is the most crucial focus.

According to TrendForce's latest survey of the server market, many cloud service providers (CSPs) have begun large-scale investments in the kinds of equipment that support artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. This development is in response to the emergence of new applications such as self-driving cars, artificial intelligence of things (AIoT), and edge computing since 2018. TrendForce estimates that in 2022, AI servers that are equipped with general-purpose GPUs (GPGPUs) accounted for almost 1% of annual global server shipments. Moving into 2023, shipments of AI servers are projected to grow by 8% YoY thanks to ChatBot and similar applications generating demand across AI-related fields. Furthermore, shipments of AI servers are forecasted to increase at a CAGR of 10.8% from 2022 to 2026.

Looking back at 2H22, as server OEMs slowed down the momentum of their product shipments, Chinese server buyers also held a conservative outlook on future demand and focused on inventory reduction. Thus, the flow of orders for enterprise SSDs remained sluggish. However, NAND Flash suppliers had to step up shipments of enterprise SSDs during 2H22 because the demand for storage components equipped in notebook (laptop) computers and smartphones had undergone very large downward corrections. Compared with other categories of NAND Flash products, enterprise SSDs represented the only significant source of bit consumption. Ultimately, due to the imbalance between supply and demand, the QoQ decline in prices of enterprise SSDs widened to 25% for 4Q22. This price plunge, in turn, caused the quarterly total revenue from enterprise SSDs to drop by 27.4% QoQ to around US$3.79 billion. TrendForce projects that the NAND Flash industry will again post a QoQ decline in the revenue from this product category for 1Q23.

The four major North American cloud service providers (CSPs) have made cuts to their server procurement quantities for this year because of economic headwinds and high inflation. Turning to server OEMs such as Dell and HPE, they are observed to have scaled back the production of server motherboards at their ODM partners. Given these developments, TrendForce now projects that global server shipments will grow by just 1.31% YoY to 14.43 million units for 2023. This latest figure is a downward correction from the earlier estimation. The revisions that server OEMs have made to their outlooks on shipments shows that the demand for end products has become much weaker than expected. They also highlight factors such as buyers of enterprise servers imposing a stricter control of their budgets and server OEMs' inventory corrections.

On January 7th, the Minisforum UM773 was launched in China with the AMD Ryzen 7 7735HS processor and received widespread praise from consumers. Now, the new version of UM773, UM773 Lite, has arrived globally with a more affordable price. Considering that users usually connect external keyboards and mouses, the two USB 3.2 ports have been replaced with USB 2.0 ports. All other design will be the same as UM773. The price, however, will be more favorable.

The new UM773 Lite features the new AMD Ryzen 7 7735HS, AMD Radeon 680M Integrated Graphics, DDR5 dual-channel memory, PCIe 4.0 SSD, and the most advanced USB4 Type-C port. The Ryzen 7 7735HS is one of AMD's new Ryzen 7000 series mobile processors, featuring 8 cores and 16 threads, with a based clock of 3.2 GHz and a maximum turbo clock of 4.75 GHz and a default TDP targeted at 54 W. The RDNA2 Radeon 680M integrated GPU has 12 CUs up to 2.4 GHz.

The Netherlands-based ASML has reportedly launched a comprehensive investigation into the company's branch in China following reports that one of its former employees allegedly stole confidential information. According to Bloomberg, the employee in question was part of a product life cycle management (PLM) program for ASML's advanced lithography solutions. Specifically, the employee worked for the Teamcenter software division responsible for lithography tool management. This software was used to create digital twins of scanners and other tools and allowed information to be shared among the company's employees. In ASML's case, the software contained all the confidential information about the scanners and how they work, which makes it a target for IP theft. We do not know if this is a China-sponsored action to boost its domestic lithography tool development; however, ASML has issued a statement below.

ASMLWe have experienced unauthorized misappropriation of data relating to proprietary technology by a (now) former employee in China. We promptly initiated a comprehensive internal review. Based upon our initial findings we do not believe that the misappropriation is material to our business. However, as a result of the security incident, certain export control regulations may have been violated. ASML has therefore reported the incident to relevant authorities. We are implementing additional remedial measures in light of this incident.

Chinese company Origin Quantum announced that it has developed China's first practical 24-qubit quantum computer using superconducting chip technology, named Wuyuan. The computer uses an unspecified number of quantum processing units (QPUs), but comes with a custom operating system, and a cloud-computing platform, allowing Chinese businesses to hire the computer as they would any HPC cloud-computing instance. Origin Quantum said that with the production of Wuyuan, the company is already developing an even more powerful quantum computer, named Wukong. Origin Quantum is one of the many curiously new Chinese high-technology startups that have sprung up and don't feature on Western tech sanctions lists, to which Western companies are forbidden to sale certain high-tech machinery and chips to.Many Thanks to TumbleGeorge for the tip.

According to Bloomberg, Japan and the Netherlands are getting ready to join the US in limiting access to advanced semiconductor manufacturing equipment for China. The three nations are currently in talks—that might end as soon as today—over how they can impose joint limits on what kind of equipment and tools can be exported to China. Apparently there will be no official announcement if a deal is struck, instead the restrictions will simply be implemented as required.

Bloomberg states that the Netherlands will expand export restrictions that ASML is already under, which according to the publication means stricter export rules around DEUV machines, which are used in cutting edge semiconductor nodes. Japan is said to implement similar export restrictions for Nikon as well as Tokyo Electron, with the US already having implemented restrictions for Applied Materials. The export restriction deal is in part being done to appease US equipment makers, who have complained that their international competitors haven't been under the same export restrictions when it comes to China, as they have. The question is if the export restrictions will hinder China in the long run, or if the nation will simply push ahead and develop its own, competing semiconductor manufacturing tools.

Update Jan 28th: Japan and the Netherlands reached an agreement with the US on Friday and the two countries are said to be making individual announcements with regards to their individual agreements with the US.