US will block circumvention of chip export restrictions to China – update
The US will prevent companies from selling certain AI chips to China that allow them to circumvent export restrictions, a US official told Reuters. This may include the H800 data center chip that Nvidia has introduced for the Chinese market.
Update, 3:06 PM: The United States has officially confirmed its new export restrictions. That writes the Reuters news agency on Tuesday afternoon. The new rules indeed include new export restrictions for advanced AI chips, which means that Nvidia’s A800 and H800 can no longer be supplied to China. The US is also introducing a new rule that limits chip exports based on ‘performance density’. This is aimed at the amount of computing power that can be supplied to China within a chip. This should also prevent manufacturers from using chiplets to circumvent export regulations. The US is also expanding its export restrictions, including the new additions, to more countries, including Iran and Russia.
Original article: The United States will introduce new export rules later this week, adding to existing export restrictions introduced a year ago. This is what the Reuters news agency writes based on an anonymous US government employee. The new rules should, among other things, prevent certain AI chips, which fall just below the performance thresholds of the existing export restrictions, from being supplied to China. Companies must now also share more details about deliveries of other chips to China, the source said. The U.S. Commerce Department, which enforces export regulations, declined to comment.
The United States specifically plans to completely remove the bandwidth parameter from the current restrictions, according to Reuters. Currently, certain chips with a reduced bandwidth may still be delivered to China, even if they exceed the other performance limits in the export rules. Under the new rules, exports can be blocked purely on the basis of computing power, even if the chip has a low bandwidth.
Current US export regulations prohibit the export of chips with a chip-to-chip bandwidth of more than 600GB/s. This should prevent China from building large supercomputers with powerful AI chips. Supercomputers consist of hundreds or thousands of these chips, which are then connected together. Limiting the bandwidth between those chips therefore results in significantly lower performance.
The Reuters source would not confirm which chips would be blocked under the new export rules. This probably concerns the Nvidia H800 and possibly the slightly older Nvidia A800. Nvidia introduced those chips shortly after export rules were introduced specifically for the Chinese market. These Chinese versions have a limited bandwidth compared to their Western counterparts.
The Nvidia A800 has a chip-to-chip bandwidth of 400GB/s, while the A100 has a bandwidth of 600GB/s. Nvidia also halved the transfer rate of the H800 compared to the H100 to comply with bandwidth regulations. The chips are otherwise identical to the A100 and H100. This allowed Nvidia to still supply its most powerful data center chips to China, despite the strict export regulations of the United States. This may soon be banned. Nvidia declined to respond to questions from Reuters. It previously said the company’s revenue would be “not directly” affected if exports of the A800 and H800 were restricted.
The Nvidia H100