by John Hugh DeMastri
American chipmaker Nvidia confirmed that it has developed an alternative high-performance chip to offer Chinese customers after the Biden administration introduced export restrictions on U.S.-made chips in a bid to hamper China’s military, Reuters reported Monday evening.
Nvidia initially revealed late in August that the U.S. government had introduced export restrictions on chips with potential military applications, particularly in the field of artificial intelligence. While Nvidia has made no formal announcement of the new chip, known as the A800, but Chinese businesses have begun advertising it on their websites and an Nvidia spokesperson confirmed the existence of the chip, according to Reuters.
“The Nvidia A800 GPU, which went into production in Q3, is another alternative product to the Nvidia A100 GPU for customers in China,” an Nvidia spokesperson told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “The A800 meets the U.S. Government’s clear test for reduced export control and cannot be programmed to exceed it.”
Compared to the previous A100 chip, which is now restricted from export, the A800 has similar computational power, but limited ability to send data to and receive data from other chips, The Wall Street Journal reported. The ability to rapidly share data between chips is critical for constructing supercomputers and developing other artificial intelligence capabilities.
Nvidia expects the chip to be successful in the Chinese market, and anticipates initial shipments within a few weeks, the WSJ reported, citing anonymous sources familiar with the matter. Nvidia did not respond to a DCNF question about how much of the $400 million in projected A100 sales the company anticipated to recoup with A800 sales.
“The A800 looks to be a repackaged A100 GPU designed to avoid the recent Commerce Department trade restrictions,” Wayne Lam, analyst at British tech consultancy firm CCS Insight, told Reuters. “China is a significant market for Nvidia and it makes ample business sense to reconfigure your product to avoid trade restrictions.”
At the time of publication, Nvidia shares were up roughly 1.6%, according to Google Finance.
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John Hugh DeMastri is a reporter at Daily Caller News Foundation.
Photo “NVIDIA Headquarters” by Coolcaesar. CC BY-SA 4.0.
