(Bloomberg) -- The Biden administration is considering new restrictions on exports of artificial intelligence chips to China, potentially adding to a list of banned semiconductor technology from Nvidia Corp., Advanced Micro Devices Inc. and other US companies.

The U.S. Department of Commerce could prohibit shipments of chips from Nvidia and others to customers in China as soon as early next month, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the situation. Such an action would be part of final rules codifying and expanding export control measures announced in October, the Journal said, including: 

• Logic chips using so-called nonplanar transistors made with 16-nanometer technology or anything more advanced than that. Generally speaking, the smaller the nanometers, the more capable the chip.
• 18-nanometer dynamic random access memory chips.
• NAND-style flash memory chips with 128 layers or more.

Nvidia, which produces graphics chips that drive the technology behind OpenAI Inc.’s ChatGPT and Alphabet Inc.’s Bard chatbots, responded to the government’s controls by making a version of its AI chips for the Chinese market called the A800 that initially fell below performance thresholds outlined by the Commerce Department. That chip replaced the A100, which is widely used in data centers to do AI computations. The new restrictions being contemplated by the department would ban the sale of even A800 chips without a license, the Journal reported.

Other countries are joining the US in banning certain chip technology to China. The Dutch government is planning to publish new export controls that will restrict the shipments of three models of ASML Holding NV’s machines from being sent to China as soon as this week, Bloomberg previously reported. Japan joined the US and Netherlands, limiting 23 types of chip exports to countries including China as early as July.

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