Nvidia shipping replacement GPU to China after US ban

Author: EIS Release Date: Nov 15, 2022

Nvidia is shipping a slowed-down version of its A100 GPU to China .

 

Called the A800, Nvidia started producing it in Q3 after the US government put a limit on the performance of ICs sold to China. The device is already in Chinese distributor catalogues.

 

Stopping sales of the A100  would have cost Nvidia $400 million in lost revenues in Q3.

 

A800 runs at 400GB/s  while A100 functions at 600GB/s per second, which is the limit set by the US government.

 

“The A800 meets the US government’s clear test for reduced export control and cannot be programmed to exceed it,” says Nvidia.

 

The Center for Strategic and International Studies explained the rationale behind the ban: “By only targeting chips with very high interconnect speeds, the White House is attempting to limit the controls to chips that are designed to be networked together in the data centers or supercomputing facilities that train and run large AI models”