Washington once again has outraged Beijing, this time by announcing new “guardrails” prohibiting any recipients of US government funding that operate in China from spending more than US$100,000 to expand their chip facilities there, or boosting such facilities' production capacity by more than 5%. They also are forbidden to expand any existing facility’s production capacity by more than 10% unless at least 85% of its output is incorporated into final products that are consumed locally. The new curbs officially apply to four countries, but it's basically China that they target as most high-end chipmakers do not have fabs in the remaining three, Russia, Iran and North Korea.