US restricts NVIDIA from exporting H100, A100 chips to China, Russia

The US government has just issued new export licensing requirements to both NVIDIA and AMD, stopping them from exporting their respective advanced GPU designs for AI-based applications to both Russia and China.

The new export controls aren't banning specific GPUs like NVIDIA's new Hopper H100 or Ampere A100 GPUs, nor is it targeting AMD's new Instinct MI200 or Instinct MI250X GPUs but rather a particular threshold of performance. NVIDIA's current A100 GPUs get close and the H100 GPUs would blow past it, so they've received notification from the US government of the new export limitations.

AMD and its current Instinct MI200 and upcoming MI250X are also slapped with the new licensing requirements, since their next-gen GPUs are super-fast at AI-related tasks and the US government can't have the Chinese government having that type of AI power. The Biden administration along with the US Commerce Department have installed new rules that will block the exporting of chip design software that is necessary to make next-gen chips... these new export restrictions are an extension of that.

The US Commerce Department said in a statement: "While we are not in a position to outline specific policy changes at this time, we are taking a comprehensive approach to implement additional actions necessary related to technologies, end-uses, and end-users to protect U.S. national security and foreign policy interests. This includes preventing China's acquisition and use of U.S. technology in the context of its military-civil fusion program to fuel its military modernization efforts, conduct human rights abuses, and enable other malign activities".

NVIDIA is mostly affected by the new restrictions, where according to an SEC filing, the US government and its new bans on exporting will cost NVIDIA as much as $400 million in quarterly sales. Considering there's four quarters a year, that's a rather hefty $1.6 billion across 12 months.

AMD on the other hand doesn't sell anywhere near as many GPUs for AI applications to China as NVIDIA, and does not believe that the new US government restrictions will have a material effect on its revenue.