Trump to Allow Nvidia to Sell a Scaled Down Version GPU Chip in China
US President Donald Trump suggested he could allow Nvidia to sell a scaled-down version of its forthcoming advanced GPU chip in China, despite serious worries in Washington about the potential for China to use US artificial intelligence advancements to boost its military power. This move could enable China to acquire enhanced computing technologies from the US, even amid the persistent technological competition between the two countries.
"Jensen (Nvidia's CEO, Huang) also has the new processor, the Blackwell, that has been somewhat detrimentally enhanced. Put simply, decrease it by 30 to 50 percent,” Trump says.
The Trump administration previously declared an extraordinary deal with Nvidia and AMD to give the US government 15 percent of profits from selling specific advanced chips in China.
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The move sent shivers across Washington, as China advocates from both parties have relentlessly sought to ensure that Beijing remains decades behind US AI progress.
"Despite having scaled-down versions of flagship Nvidia (chips), China may still purchase enough to develop advanced, frontier-level AI supercomputers," remarked Saif Khan, former Technology and National Security director at the White House National Security Council under former President Joe Biden, who enforced stringent restrictions on US AI chip exports abroad. This could lead to China overtaking America in AI capabilities."
The most advanced chip Nvidia is allowed to sell in China is the H20, which employs Nvidia's earlier Hopper architecture platform. The American AI chip company launched its latest Blackwell platform in early 2024.
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Nvidia was developing a new chip for China that was a version of its latest advanced AI Blackwell chips at a much reduced price.
Nvidia has not revealed the chip's existence or how its features stack up against its US products. However, the primary US variant of the Blackwell chip, which Nvidia revealed in March, is up to 30 times quicker than the previous model.