Hong Kong
Cnn
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Nvidia says that a financial blow of $ 5.5 billion will take a long time after Washington has imposed new restrictions on exporting its H20 artificial intelligence chips to China, in the last escalation of a growing battle for the domination of AI. His actions plunged in response.
The H20 chip, published last year, was specially designed to accommodate strict American export controls to China and allowed Nvidia to continue selling in the country. The model has less computing power than the more powerful AI H100 chip, which has already been Prohibited for sale to China.
The H20 would have contributed to the successful Deepseek development of its Chatgpt type reasoning model, R1, which would be trained in a fraction of the cost of American equivalents. Development has amazed the technological industry and sparked an AI revolution in China.
Nvidia said in regulation on Tuesday deposit The fact that he was informed by the US government last week, the H20 fleas would now require a special license to be exported to China, which explained 13% of sales Last year.
The flea manufacturer said that it would bring about $ 5.5 billion in costs in the results of its first quarter on May 28, associated with H20 products for “stocks, purchase commitments and related reserves”. Its shares were 5% lower than pre-commercial negotiations.
The analyst led by Dan Ives, a global manager of research on the technology of the Wedbush Securities financial services company, said that the financial impact is relatively low, but that the restrictions mark a “strategic blow” for Nvidia’s efforts to continue to initiate its Chinese customers.
“This disclosure is a clear sign that Nvidia now has massive restrictions and obstacles to sell to China, because the Trump administration knows that there is a chip and a company that feeds the AI revolution and that it is Nvidia,” they said in a research note on Tuesday.
The poles designer AI at the head of the industry has been caught in the fires in recent years while the United States is looking to block the use of American technology by China to advance its military and AI systems.
The US trade department confirmed on Tuesday that it issued new export license requirements to China of the H20 of Nvidia and another MI308 chip from MI308, as well as their equivalents, as well as their equivalents.
“The Commerce Department is committed to acting on the president’s directive to protect our national and economic security,” said a spokesperson for the Commerce Department.
Nvidia has been informed that the license requirement would be in place indefinitely, said the company in the file. We do not know how the United States government would grant licenses. The company refused to comment beyond its file.
The imposition of borders of the Trump administration on H20 fleas was widely awaited. Since the DEEPSEEK R1 model has shook the world markets earlier this year, American legislators on both sides of the aisle jointly called For stricter export orders on AI fleas.
During the months that followed, China experienced an AI boom, with the revelation of Deepseek which galvanized investment and pressure on Chinese companies to advance its AI sector. Investors’ confidence in the country’s technological sector has increased, which has led rallies in China and Hong Kong.
Deepseek, as well as many technological giants established in China, have been the main consumers of H20 graphic processing units in Nvidia. While the truck of Chinese technology Huawei and the manufacturer of Puces Ai Cambroon have developed alternatives to H20, these manufacturing chips in China are generally hanging around, in particular in the maturity of software, according to Brady Wang, associate director of counterpoint research, a market analysis company.
The performance gap between Chinese chips and NVIDIA should expand, said Wang, due to “the higher ecosystem of Nvidia and the manufacturing advantages”, even if the Deepseek rise demonstrates that very efficient AI models can be formed with lower equipment.
With the escalation of an aggressive trade war between the United States and China, Ives said that new restrictions could arrive.
“Although Nvidia news is worrying, this is not a shock because we are in the middle of a trade war between the United States and China and we are waiting for more punches launched by both sides,” he said.
In 2022, US President Joe Biden began to brake the sale of advanced semiconductors from flea manufacturers like Nvidia in China to fear that they can feed his soldiers. Orders were later expanded to include restrictions on the sales of tokens manufacturing equipment, Large bandwidth memory chips And products manufactured outside the United States using American technology to limit the technological progress of China.
Before Biden resigned, his administration also widened the geographic scope of these restrictions, revealing a world export framework that submits countries to different restrictions in order to prevent the advanced AI technology from putting itself in the hands of opponents such as China through third countries. The new rules should take effect next month.
The series of restrictions has been the subject of repeated criticisms on the part of the giants of American technology, in particular Nvidia, which indicates that they will know American competitiveness.
Ned Finkle, vice-president of government affairs in Nvidia, wrote in a company blog That the adoption of AI in the world fuels growth and opportunities for industries in the country and abroad. But the restrictions have put this world progress “in danger” and have threatened to “derail innovation and economic growth worldwide,” he said.