US Commerce Secretary, Gina Raimondo, gave a stern warning, aimed primarily at GPU powerhouse and chip giant, NVIDIA, about redesigning its chips for the Chinese market: Stop it.
In an interview with Fortune magazine, Raimondo warned NVIDIA that any new products with a redesign of a previously prohibited processor would become subject to scrutiny and additional restrictions. “We cannot let China get these chips. Period,” she said at the Reagan National Defense Forum in Simi Valley, California, on Saturday. “We’re going to deny them our most cutting-edge technology.”
Since the US ban on chip exports into China, NVIDIA has been trying in more ways than one, to circumvent restrictions. One such circumvention it has adopted to get under the barrier is to redesign the architecture of its GPU, ever so slightly. Case in point, the company has been selling watered-down versions of its A100 and H100 HPC GPUs to the country since last year, and that is to say nothing of the rush order of RTX 4090 that it sent off before the 17 November deadline.
China itself has been having something of a ravenous hunger for virtually all things AI and naturally, the US chips ban hasn’t helped its ambitions. Like NVIDIA, though, many Chinese companies have also needed to get creative with the circumvention; some companies have taken to dismantling RTX 4090s at scale, removing the GPU core, slapping them onto new PCBs, attaching blower-style coolers, and reselling them as “AI cards”.
“I know there are CEOs of chip companies in this audience who were a little cranky with me when I did that because you’re losing revenue,” Raimondo said. “Such is life. Protecting our national security matters more than short-term revenue.”
(Source: Fortune)
