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

US government informs NVIDIA it has restricted the GeForce RTX giant from exporting A100 and H100 server chips to both China and Russia.

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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.

US restricts NVIDIA from exporting H100, A100 chips to China, Russia 521

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.

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Anthony joined the TweakTown team in 2010 and has since reviewed 100s of graphics cards. Anthony is a long time PC enthusiast with a passion of hate for games built around consoles. FPS gaming since the pre-Quake days, where you were insulted if you used a mouse to aim, he has been addicted to gaming and hardware ever since. Working in IT retail for 10 years gave him great experience with custom-built PCs. His addiction to GPU tech is unwavering and has recently taken a keen interest in artificial intelligence (AI) hardware.

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