The US officially gave NVIDIA the go ahead to sell the company’s H200 AI chips to China. The approval, however, was not without a catch, and that catch is that the GPU brand pays 25% on all sales of the GPU back to the Trump administration.
The approval should effectively settle the months long economic feud between the US and China, but it remains to be seen whether the latter will gravitate or be enticed by the approval. For now, the US Commerce Department is currently finalising details of the arrangement, and the application for other kinds of AI Chips, such as AMD’s Instinct line of AI GPUs, should be handled in the same way.
What isn’t known at the time of writing is just how many H200 chips NVIDIA is planning to ship out, and again, it is still unclear if companies in China will actually buy these AI chips; the company’s H20 are legally available for purchase in the country, but the Chinese government has been dissuading companies at home from purchasing and leaning them from using foreign technology, and increase their reliance on homegrown AI chips.
That, and China has also accused NVIDIA of installing backdoors into its H20 AI chips, which the GPU brand has outrightly and vehemently denied.
To quickly recap, the whole debacle between the two superpowers began when the US restricted the sales of its AI chips, stating that it feared that China was using their technologies to further advance and enhance its military technologies and, in turn, its strike capabilities. By comparison, Huawei, which also produces AI Chips, does not have hardware as potent as the H200.
(Source: Reuters)
