US restricts exports of Nvidia AI chips to the Middle East | Artificial Intelligence (AI)

The United States has expanded restrictions on exports of Nvidia artificial intelligence chips even further China For some Middle Eastern countries.

Nvidia, which is One of the most valuable companies in the world worth $1.2tn, it said in a regulatory filing this week that the restrictions affected A100 and H100 chips, which are used to speed up machine learning tasks in key AI applications such as ChatGPT.

The company said the controls would have “no immediate material impact” on its results. It did not mention which countries in the Middle East were affected by these restrictions.

A person familiar with the matter told Reuters that Nvidia’s competitor in this sector, AMD, also received an insider’s letter with similar restrictions.

“During the second quarter of fiscal year 2024, the US government notified us of additional licensing requirements for a subset of the A100 and H100 products destined for certain customers and other regions, including some countries in the Middle East,” Nvidia said in a statement.

Sales of the A100 and H100 chips are already banned in China and Russia, and the extension of the trade restrictions is an escalation of the Biden administration’s efforts to limit Beijing’s ability to benefit from the artificial intelligence boom.

And in August last year, Nvidia said that US officials had asked it to stop exporting chips to China. Officials told the company that the new export rule was implemented to address the risk that the products covered would be used for a “military end use” or “military end user” in or diverted to China.

And in October, the US deployed more export controls designed to prevent China from obtaining certain semiconductor chips made anywhere in the world with US equipment.

Senior government officials said many of the rules are aimed at preventing foreign companies from selling advanced chips to China or providing Chinese companies with tools to make their own advanced chips.

Without chips from companies like Nvidia and AMD, Chinese enterprises will struggle to cost-effectively implement the kind of advanced computing used for image and speech recognition, among many other tasks.

Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, warned in May this year that… The United States risks causing “serious damage” to its technology industry If it continues to impose restrictions on trade with China.

in Interview with the Financial Times“If (China) can’t buy from… the US, it will build it itself. So the US has to be careful. China is a very important market for the technology industry,” Huang said.

Earlier this month, Nvidia reported quarterly revenue of $13.5 billion, $2 billion higher than expected.