News on August 31, according to a regulatory report, the United States originally restricted the export of NVIDIA's advanced artificial intelligence chips to China, and now plans to further expand to other regions outside China, including some countries in the Middle East.
According to Reuters, the United States usually implements export controls for national security reasons, but it is not clear why it proposed restrictions on exports to the Middle East, nor what risks advanced chips will pose when exported to the Middle East.
It is reported that in the August 28 filing, NVIDIA said that in the second quarter of fiscal year 2024, USG (United States) notified us that it has introduced additional licensing requirements for products such as A100 and H100 to be shipped to certain customers and other regions, including some countries in the Middle East.
Nvidia said the restrictions would have an impact on chips such as the A100 and H100 in the field of accelerated machine learning, but would not have a direct and material impact on their performance, but Nvidia did not specify which countries in the Middle East were affected.
The legal person pointed out that one of the reasons why the United States decided to implement export licenses for NVIDIA's A100 and H100 products may be to prevent the development of Chinese AI and prevent these GPUs from being resold to China from the Middle East. In addition, it is estimated that AMD's upcoming MI300 will also be a target of restrictions by the US government.
For the fiscal year ended July 30, most of Nvidia's $13.5 billion in sales came from the United States and China. While about 13.9% of sales come from all other countries and regions combined, Nvidia did not provide a breakdown of revenue in the Middle East.
In September last year, NVIDIA's rival AMD received notices from the United States to stop exporting its MI250 AI chips to China. In order to meet the fact that high-end chips are not allowed to be imported into China, NVIDIA, AMD and Intel have disclosed plans to produce alternative AI chips and export them to the Chinese market.
Nvidia, the U.S. Department of Commerce, which manages new export licensing requirements, did not respond to comment.