deciding who gets hurt by sweeping new us curbs on selling technology to china will come down in part to what constitutes a supercomputer experts told reutersaround the world the semiconductor industry on friday began to wrestle with wideranging us restrictions on selling chips and chip manufacturing equipment to chinashares of chip equipment makers drooped but industry experts said a new us definition of a supercomputer could be pivotal to the new rules impact on chinadata center buildouts like alibaba or bytedance would have the potential to reach petaflop buildouts said ccs insight chip analyst wayne lam saidthe new definition is unlikely to change as industry technology improves currentday chinese supercomputers may one day become the corporate standard but they will still face the limits imposed friday to stop any chip made with us equipment or technology from going into china companies may very well run into supercomputing limitations within the next couple of years lam saidjack dongarra a professor of computer science who helps lead a group called top500 that ranks the worlds fastest supercomputers said he disagreed with the static definitionthe issue is that the definition of a supercomputer will change over time he said by emailmajor chinese companies with big data centers such as baidu alibaba and bytedance did not immediately respond to requests for comment tencent declined to commentthe definition of computing power per cubic foot also may offer room for creative workarounds for instance said one expert use fiber optic cables to tie together immense computing power over a larger spacethey could spread their supercomputers out over a larger space said one chip and data center expert who requested anonymity due to the politically charged nature of the new rulesthe average supercomputer architect would say thats not how things are done but not being able to do it another way breeds a lot of creativity and willingness to do things differently