The US has expanded restrictions on NVIDIA and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) exports of advanced artificial intelligence chips beyond China to other regions, including some countries in the Middle East.
Nvidia said in a regulatory filing this week that the restrictions affecting the A100 and H100 chips, which are designed to accelerate machine learning tasks, will not have an “immediate tangible impact” on its results.
A person familiar with the matter told Reuters that rival AMD had received a letter informing them of similar restrictions and that the move had not had a tangible impact on its earnings.
US officials generally impose export restrictions for national security reasons. A similar move announced last year marked a major expansion in the U.S. crackdown on China’s technological capabilities, but it was not immediately clear what risks it posed to exports to the Middle East.
The U.S. Commerce Department, which generally administers new licensing requirements for exports, did not respond to a request for comment, according to Reuters.
Last September, AMD said it had been notified of new licensing requirements that would halt exports of its MI250 artificial intelligence chips to China.
Since then, Nvidia, AMD and Intel have revealed plans to develop less powerful artificial intelligence chips that could be exported to the Chinese market.
Nvidia did not provide a reason for the new restrictions in a regulatory filing dated Aug. 28.
Middle Eastern countries affected by the restrictions were not named, but the company reported sales of $13.5 billion in the last fiscal quarter ended July 30 from the United States, China and Taiwan. Total sales from other countries were 13.9 percent. NVIDIA has not provided any information on its revenue from the Middle East.
The company said in a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission: “The US government has notified us of additional licensing requirements for a subset of A100 and H100 products for certain customers and others in the second quarter of fiscal 2024. regions, including some countries in the Middle East.”
Last year’s results came amid mounting tensions over the fate of Taiwan, where chips for Nvidia and nearly all other major chip companies are made.
Without American artificial intelligence chips made by companies such as NVIDIA and AMD, Chinese companies cannot cost-effectively implement advanced computing used in image recognition and speech recognition and many other tasks.
