The US has blocked Nvidia from selling the GeForce RTX 4090 PC graphics card to China as part of an export ban intended to thwart the country from securing cutting-edge AI chips.
Nvidia quietly mentioned the restriction in a stock exchange filing on Tuesday, the same day the US Commerce Department announced stronger rules to prevent the Chinese government from obtaining the advanced chip supplies.
Nvidia says it’ll need to receive a license from the US government in order to sell the RTX 4090 to China and several other countries, including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Vietnam. But the chances of Nvidia securing a license for China look slim since the US crafted the export rules for the country with a presumption of denial.
The development is a bit surprising since the Commerce Department initially said it had created an exemption to allow companies to sell consumer-grade GPUs to China. However, Nvidia noted the RTX 4090 exceeds “certain performance thresholds” found in the Commerce Department’s new rules, which were designed to close loopholes in the US’s chip ban against China.
Specifically, the new rules state chips containing more than 50 billion transistors must require a license to sell to the affected countries. According to Nvidia, the RTX 4090 features 76 billion transistors. (The less powerful RTX 4080 has 45.9 billion.)
Two other GPUs Nvidia can no longer sell to China include A800 and H800, a pair of products that the company deliberately degraded to pass the US’s initial version of the export ban. In the stock exchange filing, Nvidia warns that the new licensing requirement could force the company to “transition certain operations out of one or more of the identified countries.”
The news also suggests that in the future, higher-end PC graphics cards can no longer be sold to the country. The US designed one of the new rules precisely to prevent China from cobbling together heaps of less-powerful GPUs to form a data center. But the development will come at the cost of Chinese PC users looking to buy the best gaming graphics cards.
Tech analyst Ming-Chi Kuo adds: “Nvidia will undoubtedly be negatively impacted by the new ban, given the robust demand for AI chips from Chinese customers.” The new rules are set to take effect next month.
