From PC World: The United States and China have a relationship that could be summed up in a single word as, “complicated.” Or “adversarial.” Or “contentious.” And if you want to use more than one word, “kind of like that video of two dogs growling at each other through a gate.” While megacorps just want to make as much money as possible, they have to keep this relationship in mind. Nvidia is in hot water with the US Commerce Department over recent chips designed specifically for the Chinese market.
For context, Nvidia is making unbelievably, ridiculously, stupidly huge amounts of money at the moment, providing the hardware backbone for the AI software boom. We’re talking almost $15 billion in revenue last quarter, a 400 percent increase over last year. And while Nvidia and other chipmakers are popping champagne, political powers are nervous, trying to make sure that they keep an advantage over their rivals. That’s why the United States has begun restricting the sale of certain high-powered processors to China, an embargo that was recently expanded to close some loopholes. Nvidia’s AI-focused graphics chips, including the popular H100 and H800 as well as high-end consumer graphics cards like the RTX 4090, have been explicitly banned for export to China for being too powerful for potential AI applications.
US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo has been particularly bullish on these restrictions. “The updates are specifically designed to control access to computing power, which will significantly slow the PRC’s development of next-generation frontier model, and could be leveraged in ways that threaten the U.S. and our allies,” she said back in October.
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