GINA RAIMONDO seemed frustrated when she took the stage at the Reagan National Defence Forum in California in December. The Department of Commerce, which she leads, had just tightened restrictions on the sale of American semiconductors to China. But Nvidia, the world’s most valuable chipmaker, had immediately started developing a new, slightly less powerful artificial-intelligence (AI) chip for the Chinese market, to which the restrictions would not apply. “If you redesign a chip…that enables [China] to do AI, I’m going to control it the very next day,” Ms Raimondo warned.
That was bombastic, given that it had taken her department a full year
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