[News] U.S. Reportedly Enhancing Chip Export Restrictions to China, while NVIDIA’s H20 Might Get Banned

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According to a report from Tom’s Hardware, the U.S. is considering implementing new trade sanctions on China, looking to limit China’s access to advanced AI chip technology. This could result in a ban on NVIDIA’s HGX-H20 AI GPUs to China. If implemented, NVIDIA could potentially lose roughly USD 12 billion in revenue.

To comply with U.S. export regulations, NVIDIA introduced the HGX H20 GPU specifically for the Chinese market. Although it has reduced performance, it still offers powerful AI capabilities.

As per the report, the HGX H20 GPU features 296 INT8 TOPS/FP8 TFLOPS computational performance, 96 GB of HBM3 memory, and 4.0 TB/s memory bandwidth, making it competitive with the current entry-level AI chips on the market. Despite its downgraded performance, the HGX H20 outperforms Huawei’s self-developed Ascend 920 series AI chips in practical applications due to its better memory performance.

However, during the U.S. semiconductor export policy review in October, NVIDIA’s HGX H20 GPU might face a sales ban. The anticipated restrictions could take various forms, including product-specific bans, reduced computational power, or limited memory capacity.

Most Chinese AI companies have built their application ecosystems on NVIDIA’s CUDA computing platform, which makes switching to other platforms, like Huawei’s Ascend chips, both costly and time-consuming. Although the HGX H20 GPU’s computational performance is significantly lower than the H100, its full compatibility with NVIDIA’s CUDA computing platform makes it the preferred choice for many Chinese companies and applications, the report noted.

However, it is worth noting that despite the current export controls on China, Chinese companies still manage to acquire advanced NVIDIA GPU computing power for AI and high-performance computing through intermediaries and by renting cloud service servers from companies like Google and Microsoft. This is a primary reason which prompts the U.S. to tighten restrictions.

Additionally, the U.S. might extend export restrictions to other Asian countries, such as Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, and potentially overseas Chinese companies. However, due to the complexity of these measures, effective implementation poses significant challenges, according to the report.

TrendForce notes in April that the extension of export controls now includes not only the previously restricted AI chips from NVIDIA and AMD, such as the NVIDIA A100/H100, AMD MI250/300 series, NVIDIA A800, H800, L40, L40S, and RTX4090, but also their next-generation successors like NVIDIA’s H200, B100, B200, GB200, and AMD’s MI350 series.

In response, HPC manufacturers have quickly developed products that comply with the new TPP and PD standards, such as NVIDIA’s adjusted H20/L20/L2, which remain eligible for export.

Read more

• [News] NVIDIA Reportedly Facing Price Cut Pressure of H20 Chip in China Amid Competition with Huawei
• [News] NVIDIA’s China-Exclusive H20 to Begin Pre-sales Next Month

(Photo credit: NVIDIA)