TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — New export restrictions announced by the U.S. Commerce Department on Friday (Oct. 7) on advanced semiconductors and chipmaking equipment to China will likely affect Taiwanese and Korean chipmakers as well, according to research firm TrendForce.

The new guidelines will require U.S. chipmakers to apply for a license from the Commerce Department to export chips or chipmaking equipment, which could be used in modern weapons systems, to China, government officials told The Wall Street Journal (WSJ).

Washington also issued foreign direct product rules, which ban international companies from exporting chips to China built with U.S. technology. This would include products made by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) and Samsung, as both companies rely on American tech in manufacturing.

The U.S. already requires export licenses for companies looking to export critical technologies to China that are deemed to go against American national security interests. The newly updated export controls include 16nm or 14nm chips and below with non-planar transistor architectures (such as FinFET or GAAFET), DRAM memory chips with 18nm half-pitch or less, and NAND flash memory chips with 128 layers or more.

Going forward, U.S. manufacturers, including HPC sector CPUs, GPUs, and AI accelerators used in data centers, AI, and supercomputer applications will require review before they can be exported to China, according to TrendForce. Additionally, since most HPC-related chips are made by TSMC on its 7nm, 5nm, or certain 12 nm nodes, the new U.S. export rules will negatively affect the Taiwanese chipmaker’s sales for these processes.

Meanwhile, TrendForce told CNA that Chinese chipmakers Yangtze Memory Technology Corp. and ChangXin Memory Technologies, in addition to Korean chipmakers Samsung and SK Hynix are also expected to be affected by the new U.S. export rules.