Nvidia plans to bypass US controls to supply 'custom chips' to China

In October last year, the United States began to strengthen a series of export restrictions on artificial intelligence chips to China, and continued to "increase" and expand the scope of sanctions for more than a year. Not long ago, the Biden administration issued a policy to prohibit the sale of the industry's high-end A100 and H100 artificial intelligence processors to China; In order to prevent China from obtaining high-end chips from other countries, the United States also imposed additional licensing requirements on chip products shipped to more than 40 countries. The ban was originally planned to take effect in the middle of this month, but sources exposed that the US Department of Commerce temporarily "increased" and asked US chip companies to implement the ban in advance, which led to many of their orders being unable to be delivered, and Biden was also very urgent about the matter.

So far, the ban has caused Nvidia to lose money. Previously, Nvidia accounted for more than 90% of China's imports, and 20% of the company's chips were exported to China; To this end, CEO Huang Renxun, together with the heads of other chip giants, has repeatedly "negotiated" with Washington, asking the United States to ease sanctions. As previously reported by The Wall Street Journal, Blinken met with the entrepreneurs and conveyed that Biden was adamant that the sanctions would not waver. Under such circumstances, all parties are generally pessimistic about the situation of the Chinese market in the future, and the control of the United States is only likely to be stricter rather than better.

However, the current news said that Nvidia recently plans to launch three "custom" chips for export again for the Chinese market when the new regulations officially take effect this month. The three chips, initially named HGX H20, L20 PCle and L2 PCle, are replacements for the banned A800 and H800. According to US industry sources, the chip specially for China's export has reduced some computing power and functions, but inherited most of the functions of the original chip, so that it can bypass the "regulatory rules" set by the United States to continue to export to China, and the news has not yet received a response from Nvidia.

Nvidia's move shows that it will not give up the promising market of Chinese AI processors, but find ways to "evade regulation", and even spend extra research and development power to provide new chips for China; But the more pessimistic point is that Biden's export ban is aimed at countries, not companies, which means that he will continue to lower the export ban standards if he believes that these chips have the possibility of escaping control. In addition, another chip giant in the United States Intel also plans to release a new artificial intelligence chip for China, so practitioners can not conclude what the prospects of these "exclusive chips" are.

It is worth mentioning that some Republican media such as Fox are very dissatisfied with the US chip companies for the development of customized chips for China, they believe that these companies "give up national interests to please China, and accuse them of not seeing clearly the disadvantages faced by the United States in this competition, if the rise of Chinese chips will also threaten the future exports of these companies." "The CEO of Nvidia has responded to this question before, and his conclusion is that the regulation of China is not only not good but also bad; "China will have to invest several times as much to develop new chips and mass produce them ahead of time, and obviously these companies think that's better than having China import their chips for a long time."