Marco Rubio urged the Biden administration and other members of Congress ‘to stand firm and not give in to these CEOs’ last-minute lobbying.’
GOP China hawks are slamming a lobbying effort by the semiconductor manufacturing industry to lobby the Biden administration against further restrictions on the export of chips to China.
Earlier this week, the CEOs of Intel, Qualcomm, and Nvidia reportedly held meetings in Washington with White House and Commerce Department officials. They urged the administration not to impose new restrictions that would further limit their access to the Chinese market, reports said this week.
“The heads of Intel, Nvidia, and Qualcomm are putting profits ahead of national security. These CEOs are lobbying against export controls designed to keep the Chinese Communist Party away from AI technology. China is growing stronger by the day, aided by American capital and chips. We cannot allow China to get its hands on advanced AI chips,” Senator Marco Rubio said in a statement today.
Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, national-security adviser Jake Sullivan, and national economic council director Lael Brainard planned to join a meeting at the White House on Monday, Bloomberg reported ahead of that gathering. The heads of the three chip firms were also expected to attend.
The Biden administration advanced sweeping restrictions on the export of certain advanced semiconductors and chip-making tools last fall, choking off China’s access to critical technologies it has used to develop military technology. The chip companies visited Washington in a bid to head off updates that would strengthen those rules.
Rubio also urged the Biden administration and other members of Congress “to stand firm and not give in to these CEOs’ last-minute lobbying.”
Representative Michael McCaul, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, also urged to the administration not to water down its planned restrictions in a statement on Monday.
“While I support the administration’s export controls on advanced semiconductors implemented on October 7th, it is vital the U.S. update these measures to curtail the Chinese Communist Party’s use of state-of-the-art AI technology for military purposes or violations of human rights. The White House must put national security ahead of commercial interests,” he said.
Washington views efforts to strengthen semiconductor manufacturing in America as a critical national-security interest, and Congress passed the Chips and Science Act last year to grant subsidies to firms that open plants in the U.S. But the companies that manufacture chips have also repeatedly defended their insistence on maintaining and expanding their operations in China.
Days ahead of his visit to the White house, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger visited China, meeting with Chinese industry executives. That was his second trip to the country this year, following a visit in April that overlapped with Chinese military drills surrounding Taiwan.
The Semiconductor Industry Association, the trade group that represents chip companies, issued a statement this week urging the administration not to crack down on firms’ continued access to China.
“We call on both governments to ease tensions and seek solutions through dialogue, not further escalation. And we urge the administration to refrain from further restrictions until it engages more extensively with industry and experts to assess the impact of current and potential restrictions to determine whether they are narrow and clearly defined, consistently applied, and fully coordinated with allies,” the statement said.
Intel and Qualcomm have previously lobbied against congressional efforts to restrict outbound U.S. investment to China and other regimes, National Review reported last year, and a provision to do that was blocked from the Chips and Science Act last year.
The Biden administration’s chip restrictions have been a major sticking point throughout its efforts to jumpstart high-level dialogue with China. During Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s visit to Beijing this month, officials panned U.S. export restrictions as an attempt to cripple China’s economic growth. Yellen, however, argued that they are a narrowly tailored national-security measure.