US government is looking at NVIDIA's new AI GPUs for China, says they're a 'good partner'

US Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo said that the US government is looking into the three new AI GPUs that NVIDIA is developing for China, making sure Team Green isn't breaking any new rules that the Biden administration has slapped down with its recent US sanctions.

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During an interview with Bloomberg News when Raimondo was visiting Nashua, New Hampshire, she said: "We look at every spec of every new chip, obviously to make sure it doesn't violate the export controls. We talk to NVIDIA regularly, and I should say they're a good partner. We have a close working relationship with them. They share information".

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning was asked about the US actions on Tuesday, where they said that they "undermine the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese companies and will not be conducive to the stability of the global and industrial supply chains". She added during a regular press briefing in Beijing that the new moves contradicted "the principles of market economy and fair competition".

NVIDIA is currently making three new AI GPUs that comply with US sanctions, with these AI GPUs including the HGX H20, L20 PCIe, and L2 PCIe AI GPUs. The NVIDIA HGX H20 is the most powerful, powered by the Hopper GPU architecture and packing a hefty 96GB of HBM3 memory with 4.0TB/sec of memory bandwidth.

There's also the L20 PCIe and L2 PCIe, which are both based on the Ada Lovelace GPU architecture, with the L20 PCIe featuring 48GB of GDDR6 w/ECC memory and up to 864GB/secf of memory bandwidth. The L2 PCIe AI GPU features 24GB of GDDR6 w/ECC memory and up to 300GB/sec of memory bandwidth.

NVIDIA was meant to launch its new H20 AI GPU this month, but it has been delayed until February or March 2024. We've seen Chinese companies buying and tearing apart gaming-focused GeForce RTX 4090 graphics cards and turning them into AI accelerators, seeing the price of RTX 4090s in China doubling (and more). It's an unfortunate side effect of the Biden administration and its stance on AI GPUs not getting fed out to competing countries.