Taiwan will make shipping restricted AI chips and servers to China a crime under its trade pact with the US, its economy minister tells Bloomberg

Taiwan plans to add AI servers and cutting-edge semiconductors to its list of controlled export items, Economy Minister Kung Ming-hsin told Bloomberg News in an interview given on 12 October and published on 16 October. Once the change takes effect, shipping restricted AI hardware to China would become a criminal offence under Taiwan's Foreign Trade Act, Bloomberg reported.

According to Bloomberg, unauthorised exports of AI chips to China are not a crime in Taiwan today, and prosecutors have had to use other laws against suspected smugglers. Kung tied the change to the Agreement on Reciprocal Trade that Taiwan and the United States signed this year, telling Bloomberg that “some of our measures on controlled items will correspond to American ones”. He declined to say when the measures would take effect.

Bloomberg framed the move as support for the US crackdown on chip smuggling, after US officials alleged that billions of dollars' worth of Nvidia hardware had reached China. Taiwan's economy ministry has not published a draft amendment that could be found, and the penalties some sites quote are not in Bloomberg's report, so they are left out here.

The plan came on the same day that China proposed export controls of its own on AI models, agents and computing clusters (the lead story). Taiwan is home to TSMC and to many of the contract manufacturers that assemble AI servers.

• Reported Bloomberg reports that AI servers and advanced chips will be added to Taiwan's controlled-items list, making shipments of restricted AI hardware to China a crime under the Foreign Trade Act. Bloomberg, via Yahoo Finance
• Claimed Kung told Bloomberg that “some of our measures on controlled items will correspond to American ones”, and declined to give a start date. Bloomberg, via Yahoo Finance
• Reported BusinessMirror's copy of the Bloomberg report carries the same plan to make such shipments a crime under the Foreign Trade Act. Bloomberg, via BusinessMirror