Ministers have branded the decision “incomprehensible” and asked Washington for clarification, as concerns mount about the potential impact on domestic artificial intelligence development.
President Joe Biden has decided to cap exports of these powerful chips to certain countries in an attempt to stop China and other states from acquiring powerful technology that could fuel the next generation of supercomputers.
While 18 countries, including most western European nations, will be able to buy chips freely from American companies, Poland and many of its neighbors will be subject to an import limit, widely reported as 50,000 chips a year.
‘No business rationale’
Under the new rules, countries buying U.S. chip technology – also known as graphics processing units or GPUs – are put into one of three categories. Countries such as Poland, Portugal, Switzerland, Ukraine, India and Brazil are in the second tier, giving them only restricted access.
Poland’s Minister of Digital Affairs, Krzysztof Gawkowski, said that the authorities in Warsaw were not consulted nor told in advance of the U.S. government’s decision.
“The decision taken by the US Administration regarding exports of graphics processing units (GPUs) is incomprehensible for us and is not based on any business-like premises,” he wrote on social media platform X.
Gawkowski, who is also a deputy prime minister, added that all European Union countries should be treated equally by the U.S. administration and vowed to ask the European Commission to put pressure on Washington to change its mind.
EU Commission ‘concerned’
The commission said on Monday it was “concerned” by the development and that full EU access to American chips was “in the U.S. economic and security interest.”
“I am very surprised that the U.S. Administration has presented a list ...with Poland on it,” Gawkowski told reporters later on Wednesday.
“This is a bad signal for Poland as it shows that the U.S. Administration does not understand that it has a loyal ally.”
The Polish foreign ministry confirmed that it had raised the issue with the American ambassador in Warsaw.
Fear of being left behind
Earlier this week, Gawkowski announced a €1 billion (4.5 billion złoty) investment in new technology and innovation, including a high-profile Artificial Intelligence Fund.
However, AI experts fear that Poland could be left behind its western allies if its access to the latest American technology is hindered, even if the demand for chips does not currently exceed the proposed 50,000 limit.
Dominik Andrzejczuk, head of the Quantum Data Center Corporation based in Warsaw and California, told TVP World that if “we want to develop our own AI data centers locally... 50,000 GPUs is nothing.”
“Elon Musk’s AI, they built their Colossus data center and purchased over 100,000 GPUs just for that, just for one company,” he said.
Piotr Sankowski, a prominent AI expert from the University of Warsaw, said on X that Poland could find itself only able to use artificial intelligence technology for basic civilian purposes.
“On first glance it might not seem so terrible, because the 50,000-chip limit that Poland got might sound like a lot for us, and it could yet be increased to 100,000,” he wrote.
‘Forget about supercomputers’
“But if you understand what is happening in AI development... the message of this document is unequivocal – [second tier countries] should forget about developing their own supercomputers.”
On LinkedIn, Marek Magryś from Kraków’s supercomputer network Cyfronet noted that the demand for AI chips in Poland is currently far less that the proposed limit.
He cautioned, however, that the U.S. could further curtail the number and types of chips that can be exported, adding that the move will impact efforts to develop European AI technology.
“To conclude: in the short term, these regulations will change nothing, but in the long term it endangers the development of Poland and the EU as a whole,” Magryś wrote.
