US issues guidelines blocking Nvidia’s AI chips to China
The company had provided samples to many of its Chinese customers
US President Donald Trump’s administration has informed the federal agencies that it will not permit Nvidia to sell its latest scaled-down B30A artificial intelligence (AI) chips to China.
The chip can be utilised to train large language models when arranged in large clusters, a capability many Chinese companies require. And Nvidia has provided samples of the chip to many Chinese customers.
A spokesperson for Nvidia remarked, “The company has zero share in China’s highly competitive market for datacenter compute, and does not include it in our guidance.”
The world’s most valuable company by market capitalization has been modifying the B30A chip design, hoping that the U.S. administration would reconsider its stance.
However, the California-based firm has also been facing regulatory compliance in China, which recently issued guidelines necessitating new data center projects that receive state funding to use only domestically developed chips.
Meanwhile, data centers that are less than 30 percent complete will have to remove the installed foreign chips or shelve their plans to buy them. Projects in a more advanced stage will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis.
Effectively, the instructions mean blocking Nvidia and its AI chips from a lucrative market segment, including advanced models under US export controls. Nevertheless, the AI chips are available in China’s grey market.