US blocks sales of some AI chips to China as tech crackdown intensifies

Ban on Nvidia and AMD sales marks a major escalation of US efforts to restrict China's military technology capabilities as tensions bubble over Taiwan

Chip designer Nvidia said that US officials told it to stop exporting two top computing chips for artificial intelligence work to China, a move that could cripple Chinese firms' ability to carry out advanced work like image recognition.

The company on Wednesday said the ban, which affects its A100 and H100 chips designed to speed up machine learning tasks, could interfere with completion of developing the H100, the flagship chip Nvidia announced this year.