The US government is reportedly considering further restrictions on the sale of artificial intelligence processors to Chinese companies. wall street journal. The Biden administration is reportedly concerned that Chinese companies are gaining access to top-notch AI technology through other countries or by leasing hardware from companies such as Amazon.
The U.S. Department of Commerce could take swift action and require companies like Nvidia to first obtain export licenses and then ship their products to customers in China and other potentially problematic countries. , the report claims, citing sources familiar with the matter. The new curbs could come into effect as early as next month, which could have a dramatic financial impact on NVIDIA and other companies benefiting from the AI and HPC megatrends.
The strategic move is the final step in the formalization and expansion of export control procedures announced last October. The Commerce Department did not comment on the WSJ report.
To comply with existing export regulations, Nvidia has introduced versions of its popular A100 and H100 computing GPUs (A800 and H800). The A800 and H800 are specifically designed for Chinese customers with lower performance and limited communication capabilities. Intel has followed suit. But even a Chinese blogger can get a top-of-the-line H100 computing card for $30,000 to $40,000, perhaps via other countries.
The U.S. government is also considering the possibility of imposing restrictions on leasing cloud services to Chinese AI companies. bloomberg. According to media reports, these companies are known to use services provided by cloud giants such as Amazon and Micron to train their AI models.
Nvidia earned Nearly 60% of Q1 2024 revenue came from data center hardware sales, including computing GPUs and DPUs used for AI and HPC. China, including Hong Kong, accounts for 22% of Nvidia’s revenue, Taiwan accounts for 25% of the company’s revenue, and 33% of the company’s revenue comes from US customers.
