US pressures Malaysia to stop banned AI chips potentially entering China by monitoring 'every shipment that comes to Malaysia when it involves Nvidia chips'

America to the rescue — (Image credit: Pixabay)

The United States has come into 2025 swinging when it comes to foreign imports around technology. Not only has the Trump administration implemented new tariffs that have caused Japanese companies to stockpile on US soil, but has also talked about killing the CHIPs act entirely. Now it seems the US has turned its attention to Malaysia, over concern for tech shipments being redirected from there to China, further bolstering the country's AI development.

Reuters reports that regulations around semiconductors in Malaysia are about to be tightened due to US interest. The Financial Times spoke to Trade Minister Zafrul Aziz, who said Malaysia would have to closely track the movement of high-end Nvidia chips at the behest of the United States government.

"[The US is] asking us to make sure that we monitor every shipment that comes to Malaysia when it involves Nvidia chips," Aziz told the newspaper. "They want us to make sure that servers end up in the data centres that they're supposed to and not suddenly move to another ship."

With crucial hardware, such as graphics cards, already seeming impossible to get, stricter trade rules alongside these tariffs spell bad news for PC gamers. The largest lobbying group for gamers in the US has already come out and said the tariffs will negatively impact millions of Americans, while manufacturers like Acer and ASRock have already admitted they're going to raise their prices in response.

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Hope’s been writing about games for about a decade, starting out way back when on the Australian Nintendo fan site Vooks.net. Since then, she’s talked far too much about games and tech for publications such as Techlife, Byteside, IGN, and GameSpot. Of course there’s also here at PC Gamer, where she gets to indulge her inner hardware nerd with news and reviews. You can usually find Hope fawning over some art, tech, or likely a wonderful combination of them both and where relevant she’ll share them with you here. When she’s not writing about the amazing creations of others, she’s working on what she hopes will one day be her own. You can find her fictional chill out ambient far future sci-fi radio show/album/listening experience podcast right here.

No, she’s not kidding.

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