Industrial Policy & Trade Monitor· 2666 actions· ✨ 89 recent

On 20 November 2025 the White House and US Department of Commerce / Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) authorised Abu Dhabi AI holding company G42 to import advanced computing chips — equivalent to approximately 35,000 Nvidia GB300 Blackwell processors — under the UAE-pioneered Regulated Technology Environment (RTE) compliance framework. The RTE is an Emirati-designed technology governance and audit architecture, developed by G42 and approved under BIS guidelines, with binding UAE-side controls to prevent onward diversion to foreign adversary nations. The authorisation accelerates the Stargate UAE project — a 1 GW AI compute cluster being built by G42 for OpenAI in partnership with Oracle, Cisco, NVIDIA, and SoftBank Group — and represents the first concluded major country-level advanced-compute authorisation following the May 2025 rescission of the Biden-era AI Diffusion Rule.

Singapore issued a package of four companion instruments in 2025 to modernise its strategic-goods control architecture: (i) the Strategic Goods (Control) Order 2025 (SGCO 2025), which revokes and replaces SGCO 2024 (S 641/2024) and expands the Singapore Strategic Goods Control List to align with the 2024 Wassenaar Arrangement Munitions List and 2024 EU List of Dual-Use Items, effective 1 December 2025; (ii) the Strategic Goods (Control) (Brokering) (Amendment) Order 2025 (S 662/2025), published 1 October 2025, updating Singapore's extraterritorial brokering regime for controlled goods; (iii) Singapore Customs Circular 01/2025 of 8 April 2025, amending import/export declaration requirements to mandate disclosure of the final destination country of goods rather than the consignee address on the commercial invoice; and (iv) a 4 April 2025 joint MTI–Singapore Customs advisory explicitly warning Singapore-based businesses and intermediaries that their compliance obligations extend beyond Singapore's own controls — i.e., that Singapore authorities will not condone deliberate circumvention or violation of US, EU, or Japanese export controls by Singapore-domiciled intermediaries. This package constitutes the first Singapore export-control-architecture filing in the IPTM register and is directly framed by the February 2025 Singapore–NVIDIA–Inspur–DeepSeek GPU-diversion case in which three Singapore residents were charged for fraudulent re-export of restricted AI accelerators to PRC end-users.

Malaysia's Ministry of Investment, Trade and Industry, acting through the Strategic Trade Controller, issued Directive No. 1/2025 on 14 July 2025 invoking Section 12 of the Strategic Trade Act 2010 to declare high-performance US-origin AI chips (GPUs, TPUs, neural processors, AI accelerators meeting the Annex I total-processing-performance and performance-density thresholds) as "unlisted controlled items". With effect from 14 July 2025, any export, transshipment, or transit of those chips through Malaysian territory requires a Strategic Trade Permit, a 30-day prior notification, an export-control classification from the manufacturer, and a re-export licence from the originating country. The directive is the formal Malaysian response to US scrutiny over alleged Nvidia AI-chip flows to China via Malaysian freight forwarders and data-centre operators, and it remains binding even after the US relaxes its own export rules.

On 13 May 2025, two days before the AI Diffusion Rule's primary 15 May 2025 compliance date, the Trump administration's BIS announced it would rescind the Biden-era Framework for AI Diffusion (90 FR 4544) and simultaneously issued three guidance documents that re-routed US AI export policy through existing EAR authorities. The package comprises (1) GP10 guidance asserting that all ECCN 3A090 ICs designed by PRC-headquartered firms are presumptively EAR-violative, with Huawei Ascend 910B/910C/910D processors named explicitly — making US- and non-US-person use, transfer, financing, or servicing of those chips anywhere in the world a presumptive General Prohibition 10 violation; (2) a policy statement warning industry that supplying US advanced computing ICs for training or inference of Chinese AI models risks EAR enforcement; and (3) industry guidance on diversion-prevention diligence. BIS stated a formal Federal Register rescission and replacement rule would follow.

The US Bureau of Industry and Security amended the Export Administration Regulations to add 12 entities to the Entity List under the destinations of China (11) and Taiwan (1) via Final Rule 2025-05427 (90 FR 14046), companion to the larger 70-entity rule (2025-05426) published the same day. Targets fall in three clusters: (i) Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence and Beijing Innovation Wisdom Technology — added for acquiring US-origin items in support of China's military modernization, specifically developing large AI models and advanced computing chips for defense; (ii) the Inspur group — Inspur (Beijing) Electronic Information Industry, Inspur Electronic Information Industry, Inspur Electronic Information (Hong Kong), Inspur (HK) Electronics, Inspur Software, and Inspur Taiwan — added as subsidiaries contributing to supercomputers for military end use; and (iii) Henan Dingxin, Nettrix Information Industry, Suma Technology, and Suma-USI Electronics — added for involvement in the development of Chinese exascale supercomputers. License requirements are for all items subject to the EAR; review policy is presumption of denial for the AI cluster and policy of denial for the supercomputer clusters.

BIS published an interim final rule (FR Doc 2025-00711, 90 FR 4544-publication slot; companion to the AI Diffusion Framework signed three days earlier) revising the EAR to add explicit due-diligence procedures for advanced computing integrated circuits captured by ECCN 3A090. The rule (i) creates an Authorized IC Designer / Approved IC Packager regime so that foundries and OSATs can identify trustworthy customers via lists maintained by BIS, (ii) imposes new front-end-fabricator reporting requirements for any 3A090.a IC produced for an authorized IC designer to give the US government supply-chain visibility, and (iii) adjusts the scope of covered advanced-computing items. Effective 16 January 2025; compliance required from 31 January 2025; comment period extended to 14 March 2025. The rule was immediately followed by the 16 January Entity List additions (Sophgo et al.) targeting circumvention paths and was technically amended on 14 February 2025 to narrow the RS license requirement to ECCN 3A090.a only.

The Bureau of Industry and Security signed an Interim Final Rule on 13 January 2025 (90 FR 4544, published 15 January 2025) introducing the first horizontal export-control regime for advanced AI compute and closed-weight model weights. It revised ECCN 3A090 advanced-IC thresholds, created a new ECCN 4E091 covering closed-weight model weights trained on more than 10^26 operations, and bucketed every destination worldwide into a three-tier country group: Tier 1 (~18 close allies, license-free flows), Tier 2 (the rest of the world, per-country compute caps with National VEU and Universal VEU pathways), Tier 3 (US arms-embargoed destinations including China and Russia under comprehensive denial). It added license exceptions AIA, ACM, and LPP and set staggered compliance dates of 15 May 2025 (general) and 15 January 2026 (data-center / model-weight provisions). The Trump administration's BIS rescinded the rule on 13 May 2025 — two days before the primary compliance date — but it was on the books for four months and shaped allied compliance build-out and the architecture of subsequent US AI export controls.