By Bill HuizengaShareNewsweek is a Trust Project memberLast month, President Donald Trump created a generational opportunity by bolstering America’s lead in artificial intelligence (AI) when he refused to negotiate selling China the crown jewels of U.S. technology: cutting-edge AI chips like Nvidia’s Blackwell.
That decision was crucial to keep the world’s most advanced chips out of China’s hands and ensuring that Silicon Valley—not Shenzhen—remains the center of the AI revolution. However, sustaining that lead will require stopping China from building its own versions of the very chips we refused to sell them.
...In order to do this, we must close loopholes in U.S. export controls on the chipmaking tools needed to manufacture advanced AI processors. American and allied companies dominate the development of these multimillion-dollar machines capable of etching features smaller than the width of a strand of human DNA.
China’s most viable pathway to becoming an AI power is to stockpile these chipmaking tools and the critical components needed to build them. President Trump recognized the strategic importance of this equipment early. He convinced the Dutch government in 2019 to block sales of the world’s most advanced chipmaking tool—the EUV lithography machine—to the Chinese Communist Party. Without EUV, it is impossible to produce the highest-end chips.
Former President Joe Biden later expanded these restrictions, but many of the new rules contained free passes for companies in American allied nations. While some controls were effective, Dutch and Japanese companies exploited exemptions to help fuel the Chinese Communist Party’s AI ambitions and military modernization. The Biden administration looked the other way as China stockpiled these era-defining machines.
China will produce roughly 200,000 advanced AI chips this year. Unless America closes these export-control loopholes, that figure could skyrocket to upwards of a million in a few years. America and its allies could still build chips at a higher volume and better quality than China, but closing these loopholes would disrupt the Chinese Communist Party’s military modernization and keep them out of the global AI revolution almost entirely.
President Trump and House Republicans are determined to prevent China from leapfrogging the United States. On the first day of his second term, President Trump directed the Departments of State and Commerce to identify and eliminate loopholes in all existing export controls. The Trump administration’s AI Action Plan goes further, recommending that the United States press allies to stop backfilling U.S. technology and restrict sales to China of technologies that Beijing needs to build its own chipmaking tools.
The Chinese Communist Party’s objective is to manufacture its own AI chips rather than rely on U.S.-made ones. If Beijing succeeds in building its own advanced semiconductor equipment, America’s controls will become irrelevant. That is why the Chinese Communist Party is racing to stockpile tools, components and spare parts.
America must act soon. Otherwise, the Chinese Communist Party could win the AI race and lead the world into a dystopian future. If Beijing dominates chip manufacturing, it would gain leverage over the daily lives of Americans to a level once believed to be unthinkable. This danger is even greater than the concerning level of influence China currently exerts over rare earth elements. Such an advancement would also propel the Chinese military and potentially give them a decisive edge over U.S. and allied forces in the Indo-Pacific.
President Trump’s AI Action Plan offers a blueprint for victory. Now Congress and the executive branch must act quickly to close export-control loopholes and enhance enforcement. That’s why I’m introducing the STRIDE Act to close carveouts in U.S. export controls, allowing allied toolmakers to fuel China’s military. Specifically, the STRIDE Act requires the secretary of State to coordinate with allied countries that maintain significant semiconductor technology capabilities to align export control policies, enhance monitoring and enforcement mechanisms to prevent circumvention and establish trusted supplier networks for critical components and services.
America is still leading the AI arms race. However, the decisions America makes today will decide if we keep that edge or permanently lose it to the Chinese Communist Party.
Representative Bill Huizenga (R-Mich.) is House Foreign Affairs South and Central Asia Subcommittee chairman.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
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