U. S. giant Nvidia Corp, the world’s largest chipmaker, is touting a lower-performing edition of its graphics product aimed at video players in China, after Washington tightened restrictions on what the company can market in the country.
The GTX 4090 D edition introduced for sale in China by Nvidia has around 10% fewer processing cores than the 4090 sold in other countries.
“The GeForce RTX 4090 D has been designed to comply with U. S. government export controls. “”It will be sold in the U. S. and will be sold in China,” an Nvidia spokesperson said in an email.
Photo: I-Hwa Cheng, AFP
The company’s CEO, Jensen Huang (黃仁勳), said it would produce versions of its market-leading products for China that would comply with regulations imposed through US President Joe Biden’s administration on exports to that country.
The U. S. , seeking to slow progress in China’s synthetic intelligence (AI) capabilities, is restricting its use to specialized chips in that market.
The company said it is “broadly engaged” with the U. S. government in the development of the graphics product, which will be available next month.
Compared with the 4090 sold elsewhere, the China model will also have fewer processing subunits that are useful for accelerating AI workloads, Nvidia said.
US officials, who have cited national security concerns, are more interested in Nvidia’s AI accelerators, a range that is currently topped by the H100. That type of chip, which is based on technology used in graphics cards, has become the basis of an explosion in AI-capable hardware by owners of large data centers.
When U. S. export regulations were tightened last year, Nvidia brought lower-performance versions of its chips to China. The U. S. took restrictive measures in October, further cutting functionality thresholds. Nvidia’s control responded by saying the company would support the renewal of its offerings for the Asian country, the largest chip market, in order to bring them into compliance with the new regulations.
Nvidia inventories rose less than 1% to $497. 10 at 12:25 p. m. The stock has more than tripled this year, making Nvidia the best-performing semiconductor stock this year and the smartest company in the industry with a market value of $1 trillion.