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By Jane Lanhee Lee and Stephen Nellis

(Reuters) –     Deciding who gets hurt by sweeping new U.S. curbs on selling technology to China will co*e down in part to what constitutes a “superco*puter,” experts told Reuters.

Around the world, the semiconductor industry on Friday began to wrestle with wide-ranging U.S. restrictions on selling chips and chip manufacturing equipment to China.

Shares of chip equipment makers drooped, but industry experts said a new U.S. definition of a superco*puter could be pivotal to the new rules’ impact on China.

Superco*puters can be used in developing nuclear weapons and other military technologies, and experts say how to define them has long bedeviled regulators trying to pin down an ever-advancing technological target.

The new American rules define superco*puters broadly in terms of co*puting power in a defined space: a machine with 100 petaflops – the ability to carry out 100 trillion operations per second – in 41,600 cubic feet, with some other caveats.

Senior government officials said in a media briefing that their intention was to target only China’s most advanced systems that could represent a national security threat to the United States rather than co*mercial activity.

But experts wondered whether Chinese tech giants’ densely packed data centers owned by the likes of Alibaba Group Holding or TikTok-owner ByteDance might soon reach superco*puter status based on the new definition, even if that is not what U.S. regulators intended.

“Data center build-outs like Alibaba or ByteDance would have the potential to reach petaflop build-outs,” said CCS Insight chip analyst Wayne Lam said.

The new definition is unlikely to change as industry technology improves. Current-day Chinese superco*puters may one day beco*e the corporate standard, but they will still face the limits imposed Friday to stop any chip made with U.S. equipment or technology from going into China. co*panies “may very well run into superco*puting limitations within the next couple of years,” Lam said.

Jack Dongarra, a professor of co*puter science who helps lead a group called TOP500 that ranks the world’s fastest superco*puters, said he disagreed with the static definition.

“The issue is that the definition of a superco*puter will change over time,” he said by email.

Major Chinese co*panies with big data centers such as Baidu, Alibaba and ByteDance did not immediately respond to requests for co*ment. Tencent declined to co*ment.

The definition of co*puting power per cubic foot also may offer room for creative workarounds. For instance, said one expert, use fiber optic cables to tie together immense co*puting power over a larger space.

“They could spread their superco*puters out over a larger space,” said one chip and data center expert who requested anonymity due to the politically charged nature of the new rules.

“The average superco*puter architect would say, ‘That’s 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.”

(Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco and Jane Lanhee Lee in Oakland, California; editing by Peter Henderson, Ken Li and Richard Chang)