U.S. Bans Sales of Nvidia's H100, A100 GPUs to Middle East
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
[...] The U.S. government has restricted sales of Nvidia's high-performance compute GPUs to the Middle East and some other countries, the company said in a regulatory filing this week. One of the reasons why the Biden administration decided to require an export license on Nvidia's A100 and H100 products and servers on their base is tothwart China's AI development by preventing theGPUsfrom being resold to China, reportsThe Guardian.
"During the second quarter of fiscal year 2024, theU.S. governmentinformed us of an additional licensing requirement for a subset of A100 and H100 products destined to certain customers and other regions, including some countries in the Middle East," astatementby Nvidia reads. "We have sold alternative products in China not subject to the license requirements, such as our A800 or H800 offerings."
The affected chips, namely the H100 and A100 models, are already restrictedfor salein China and Russia, which is why Nvidia has developed H800 and A800 models with reduced performance to sell in China. Although Nvidia disclosed these new limitations in a U.S. regulatory filing, the company did not reveal which countries in the Middle East are specifically impacted by these controls.
Both Saudi Arabia and the UAEhave been strengthening their AIprowess in the recent years, which is why they aresignificant purchasers of Nvidia's chips.Saudi Arabia and the UAE have been in talks with China to deepen their collaborations. Furthermore, Saudi Arabia even entered into a strategic alliance with China, committing to work collaboratively on artificial intelligence projects.
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