From supertankers to superchips: The new BIS rule and Washington's double geoeconomic squeeze on Beijing

The following strategic analysis integrates the latest regulatory developments from the US Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS), the geo-economic dynamics of the realist paradigm, and the infrastructural challenges of China's artificial intelligence (AI) and data center ecosystem.

The final rule issued today by the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS), scheduled for publication in the Federal Register on January 15, 2026, marks a fundamental turning point in American strategy, transforming the export policy toward China from a "presumption of denial" to a "case-by-case review". This geoeconomic precision maneuver, following presidential directives from December 2025, aims to establish a form of instrumental dependence. By allowing the sale of advanced chips such as the Nvidia H200 and AMD MI325X—provided they meet precise technical parameters such as a TPP below 21,000 and a DRAM bandwidth below 6,500 GB/s—Washington aims to slow the development of a sovereign hardware ecosystem in China. The semiconductors covered include the Nvidia H200 and its equivalents, provided they are commercially available in the U.S. at the time of publication. The stated goal is to ensure that American technology becomes the pivot upon which Chinese AI rotates, allowing the United States to maintain constant leverage over Beijing through what experts define as "instrumental dependence".

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Under the legal and compliance profile, the new rule introduces an unprecedented paradigm of proactive surveillance. Licenses are no longer static concessions but intelligence tools: to qualify, the exporter must certify that there is sufficient supply in the United States and that production for China will not divert global foundry capacity intended for U.S. customers. Most importantly, every shipment of advanced computing commodities must undergo independent third-party testing in the United States prior to shipment to verify performance specifications. These third-party labs must be headquartered in the U.S., free from any ties to manufacturers or entities in Country Group D:5 or Macau, and testing must take place in the U.S. customs territory. This legal requirement serves as a technical "Trojan horse," as it allows the BIS to verify the actual performance and limits of every configuration destined for China. Furthermore, the obligation for Chinese buyers to adopt strict Know Your Customer (KYC) procedures to screen and prevent unauthorized remote access forces a mandatory transparency on Beijing, revealing internal flows and end-users to American commercial intelligence apparatuses.

This technological lever fits into a framework of "geoeconomic encirclement" based on strategic realism, where the control of energy resources and the use of asymmetric pressures replace formal treaties as actual guarantors of peace. While the United States uses the oil lever—exemplified by the January 13, 2026 U-turn of supertankers Xingye and Thousand Sunny due to the U.S. embargo on Venezuelan crude—to strike the vital arteries of the Chinese economy, the new silicon rule hits the heart of its digital ambitions. Washington's strategy configures a total challenge, exploiting financial centrality and the strength of the dollar to respond to the Chinese near-monopoly on critical raw materials. By offering U.S. products superior in performance and ecosystem, the U.S. aims to pollute the Chinese domestic market, making R&D investments by local companies like Huawei or Biren commercially less sustainable and slowing their "step function" toward technological autarky.

The timing chosen for this controlled opening is crucial, as it arrives while China is experiencing a profound crisis in its data centers. Although Beijing has managed to produce world-class AI models, success hits the wall of inference. American controls have worked effectively, creating a computing vacuum that renders Chinese AI giants unable to serve the mass market in real time. Nvidia's H20, initially downgraded for training to comply with earlier regulations, had inadvertently become the perfect pillar for Chinese inference; its blocking in April paralyzed the ability of labs to offer stable services to paying customers.

Simultaneously, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Remote Access Security Act (RASA) on January 12, 2026, to close the "cloud loophole". This bipartisan bill defines the remote use of controlled technologies via the Internet as a controlled "export," requiring licenses for foreign entities to access sensitive U.S. hardware remotely. If enacted, this would prevent Chinese companies from using offshore data centers to bypass chip restrictions, potentially causing the first true compute shortage since 2022.

Without constant access to optimized chips, Chinese companies have been forced into emergency solutions, such as "software squeezing hardware" techniques like quantization and pruning, which have reached their practical limits. The new BIS rule intervenes in this wound: providing the necessary technological oxygen (the H200) but under strict American monitoring, Washington bets on the possibility of "domesticating" Chinese development. If Beijing's companies choose the path of controlled importation to solve the immediate emergency of data centers, the incentive to build an independent national supply chain could drastically weaken.

In conclusion, the game is now played on a double track: on one hand, the Chinese need for immediate computing power not to lose the AI race; on the other, the American strategy of dynamic flow control. In a world where sovereignty is measured in bandwidth and energy control, the United States is demonstrating that global stability does not depend on an ideal of regulated peace, but on the ability to realistically manage the levers of mutual coercion. China thus remains suspended between the temptation to use the best available American silicon and the risk of finding itself, in a future moment of crisis, with a technological plug that Washington can pull at its discretion.