The Commerce Department's Framework for Artificial Intelligence Diffusion, issued by the Bureau of Industry and Security in January 2025, does not just restrict chip sales — it restructures the entire AI hardware market by dictating which companies can sell full-performance silicon and to whom.
The rule divides the world into three tiers. Tier 1 (18 allied nations) gets unrestricted access. Tier 2 (most of the rest of the world) faces quantity caps — roughly 50,000 high-end GPUs per country over the 2025-2027 window. Tier 3 (China, Russia, Iran, and a handful of others) is effectively closed. The mechanism that matters: performance thresholds. Chips that exceed defined compute ceilings require a license or are simply banned in restricted destinations. That single lever reshapes who wins.