US federal prosecutors have charged Greg Lui, a San Gabriel, California business owner, with shipping more than $300 million worth of advanced computer servers to China through Malaysia and Singapore without the export licenses US rules require for powerful chips, between 2023 and 2024. These are charges, not a conviction, and Lui has not yet had his day in court. Cases like this are the mechanism the US is using to try to keep its most advanced computing power out of reach of rival countries, even though enforcing it, one shipment at a time, is clearly hard.
America told exporters that its existing licence rules for advanced AI chips already apply to companies headquartered in China and a short list of other countries, including their offices elsewhere in the world. No new law was written. It is a statement about how the rule already on the books will be enforced.