Chip designer Nvidia said on Wednesday that US authorities have ordered it to stop exporting to China two of its main computer chips for artificial intelligence work, jeopardizing a business that accounted for $400 million in sales in the current quarter.
Nvidia said the ban, which affects its A100 and H100 chips designed to speed up machine learning tasks, could interfere with the completion of development of the H100, the company’s flagship chip announced earlier this year. The revelation sent its shares down around 3% in post-lockdown trading..
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The ad represents a significant escalation of technological tensions between the United States and China. Without the American chips from companies like Nvidia and its rival Advanced Micro Devices (AMD)Chinese organizations will not be able to profitably carry out the kind of advanced computing that is used for image and speech recognition, among many other tasks.
AMD makes AI chips similar to Nvidia’s and did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment. It should be noted that AMD shares were down 2% in after-hours trading.
