As the tech crackdown deepens, the US prohibits the sale of specific AI processors to China.
Nvidia, a company that designs computer chips, claimed that US officials ordered it to cease shipping two of the best computing chips for artificial intelligence work to China. This action might seriously impair Chinese companies’ capacity to perform complex tasks like image recognition.
The business stated on Wednesday that the prohibition, which affects its A100 and H100 chips made to accelerate machine learning activities, could prevent the development of the H100, the company’s flagship chip unveiled this year, from being completed.
The new rule “will address the possibility that the covered items may be employed in, or diverted to, ‘military end use’ or a ‘military end user’ in China,” according to Nvidia, which claimed to have heard this from US officials.
The announcement denotes a significant uptick in the US’s campaign against China’s technological might as tensions over Taiwan’s future, where Nvidia and nearly all other big semiconductor companies source their chips, rise.
A representative for rival AMD told Reuters that the company had received additional license requirements that would prevent the export of its MI250 artificial intelligence processors to China, but that it does not anticipate any impact on its MI100 chips.
Chinese organisations won’t be able to efficiently do the kind of advanced computation needed for image and speech recognition, among many other jobs, without American chips from companies like Nvidia and AMD.