BIS staffing stalls chip licenses
U.S. approvals for Nvidia and AMD AI-chip exports to China are stalling because the Bureau of Industry and Security has lost nearly a fifth of its licensing staff, creating a bureaucratic bottleneck. (tomshardware.com) The story frames export control risk as not just legal restriction but administrative throughput — firms are facing unpredictable delays as licensing capacity tightens. (tomshardware.com)
A staffing crunch inside the Commerce Department is turning United States chip export controls into a waiting game for Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices. (finance.yahoo.com) The Bureau of Industry and Security, the office that reviews these licenses, has shed 101 employees since 2024, a 19% drop, according to a Bloomberg analysis cited by Yahoo Finance. Approval times have stretched to 76 days in the first half of 2025, up from 38 days in 2023. (finance.yahoo.com) The bureau does not just police banned shipments. It also processes licenses for sales the White House has signaled it may allow, including Nvidia H200 shipments to approved Chinese customers, Advanced Micro Devices MI308 approvals, and some sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. (finance.yahoo.com) That matters because the export system for advanced chips already runs through a long interagency review. The Government Accountability Office said in June 2025 that the Bureau of Industry and Security reviews dual-use exports with the Departments of Defense, Energy, and State, and that the bureau had not done a bureau-wide workforce planning effort since 2016. (gao.gov) The licensing pileup lands in a market the United States has tightened in stages since October 7, 2022, when the Bureau of Industry and Security imposed new controls on advanced computing chips and semiconductor equipment for China. The bureau expanded those rules again on October 17, 2023, then added new due-diligence requirements for advanced computing integrated circuits on January 16, 2025. (bis.gov) (cset.georgetown.edu) (federalregister.gov) The result is that compliance is no longer only about whether a chip is legal to sell. Companies also have to guess how long the government will take to process a license after the rules are applied. (finance.yahoo.com) (gao.gov) The Bureau of Industry and Security itself has said it needed more time this month to process applications under one part of its chip rules. On April 7, 2026, it extended through December 31, 2026 a timeline for “authorized integrated circuit designers,” saying the extension would allow more time for companies to submit applications and for the bureau to process them. (bis.gov) Nvidia has already told investors that China’s share of its data center revenue fell from 19% in fiscal 2023 to 14% in fiscal 2024, and that it had not received United States government licenses to ship restricted products to China in that period. Advanced Micro Devices said in its 2024 annual report that data center revenue reached $12.6 billion as it scaled its Instinct accelerator business, putting more of its growth inside the same licensing system. (sec.gov) (ir.amd.com) Bloomberg reported that Under Secretary Jeffrey Kessler has been personally examining nearly every license application, adding another checkpoint inside an office already short on experienced staff. For chip companies, the hold-up is no longer just the rulebook; it is the line at the window. (finance.yahoo.com)
