Export‑control staffing pinch
U.S. export controls on advanced AI chips are being slowed by a sharp staffing drop at the Bureau of Industry and Security, which has lost nearly 20% of its licensing and rulemaking staff. That personnel shortfall is creating a backlog in approvals for Nvidia and AMD chip exports to China, according to reporting that links approval delays to ordinary institutional attrition. (tomshardware.com)
The office that approves U.S. exports of advanced artificial intelligence chips has lost so many people that license reviews for China are slowing to a crawl. (bloomberg.com) Bloomberg reported that the Bureau of Industry and Security has shed 101 employees since 2024, a 19% drop in headcount, based on Office of Personnel Management data, LinkedIn updates, and agency records. Turnover in the bureau’s licensing and rulemaking ranks was close to 20%, the report said. (bloomberg.com) That staffing loss is hitting the approvals needed for Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices to ship China-specific chips. Bloomberg said average turnaround time rose to 76 days in the first half of 2025, up from 38 days in fiscal 2023. (bloomberg.com) Export controls work like a gate on sensitive technology: companies file for a license, and the government decides whether a shipment can leave the country. The Bureau of Industry and Security said its average license-processing time was 38 days in fiscal 2023, when it handled 37,943 applications. (bis.gov) The bottleneck comes after Washington tightened the rules again in April 2025. The Commerce Department said on April 15, 2025, that Nvidia’s H20 and Advanced Micro Devices’ MI308 chips would require export licenses for China. (usnews.com) Nvidia said on July 15, 2025, that the U.S. government had assured it licenses for H20 sales to China would be granted and that it hoped to start deliveries soon. Advanced Micro Devices said the same day that Commerce planned to resume reviewing license applications for its MI308 products. (cnbc.com 1) (cnbc.com 2) The licensing delays did not start this month. Reuters reported on August 1, 2025, that thousands of export applications were stuck at the Bureau of Industry and Security and that one U.S. official called it the longest backlog in more than three decades. (usnews.com) Commerce did not publicly dispute the existence of tighter reviews. Reuters reported in August 2025 that the department said license reviews now included stricter national-security checks and were no longer automatic. (usnews.com) The larger fight is over chips built for artificial intelligence training and inference, the computing work behind chatbots, image generators, and military data analysis. Washington has spent the past three years trying to keep the most capable U.S. processors and chipmaking tools out of China while still letting some lower-performance products through. (commerce.gov) (usnews.com) For Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices, the immediate question is not only what the rules allow, but how fast the government can process the paperwork. For the Bureau of Industry and Security, the staffing shortfall has turned export control from a policy problem into an execution problem. (bloomberg.com)
