US imposes indefinite ban on Nvidia H20 chip exports to China
According to Radio Free Asia (RFA) report, the US has banned the export of Nvidia's H20 chip to China, tightening its control over trade of advanced AI technology with Beijing, part of Washington's strategy to put pressure on China amid the ongoing tariff dispute.
Nvidia, a major player in AI chip development around the world, said on Tuesday that the U.S. government informed them on April 9 that exporting its H20 chips to China will now require government permission. The company also said that this ban will remain in effect indefinitely. Although the H20 chip has relatively limited computing capabilities, it has features that make it suitable for building high-performance computing systems.
The RFA report reports that the US government allegedly based its decision on fears that the H20 chips could be used in Chinese supercomputers or that they could be modified. The H20 was the most sophisticated artificial intelligence chip allowed to be legally exported to China, already subject to U.S. national security-related sanctions on high-level semiconductor sales. Although its performance doesn't match NVIDIA's latest Blackwell chip, it's equipped with the high-bandwidth memory used in Blackwell, which provides a performance boost for certain applications, RFA reported.
The H20 chip gained attention when it was used by DeepSeeq, a Chinese AI startup that introduced a cost-effective and competitive AI model trained with the chip in January. Earlier this year, tech media outlet, The Information, reported that major Chinese tech firms, including Alibaba, Tencent, and ByteDance, collectively ordered more than USD16 billion worth of H20 chips in the first quarter, an increase of more than 40% from the previous quarter, as noted in the RFA report.
The US first imposed export controls on AI chips targeting China in October 2022 and has since extended the sanctions to additional technologies and countries. The enforcement of export limits on H20 chips according to the RFA coincides with an escalation in trade tensions between the US and China.