The rules made Nvidia’s latest data center-grade GPUs and many of its high-end retail cards, such as its advanced A800 and H800 AI chips, ineligible for export, spurring the development of modified processors to secure Nvidia’s market position in China.
However, even the forthcoming modified chips don’t rule out a new change in regulation that could ban even H20 and its companion technology for export to China, industry watchers say. In fact, the A800 and H800 themselves were introduced as alternatives for Chinese customers in November 2022 about a month after the U.S. first restricted exports of advanced microchips and equipment to China.
This worry that “another round of restrictions might even make this H20 not compliance-ready in a few months” could even cause some Chinese OEMs to balk at adopting the new chips, noted Guarav Gupta, vice president analyst, emerging technologies and trends, with Gartner Group.
Still, as “there are limited options for China to procure local chips with similar AI capability,” the news that H20 is finally rolling toward production should be positively received – for now, he said.
“That combined with Nvidia’s ecosystem still makes it attractive for the time – [until] China develops its own capabilities,” Gupta said.
