Chinese Tech Titans Move To Stockpile $5 Billion Of Nvidia AI Chips Fearing Further Export Restrictions By U.S This Time Targeting A800 Processors

Chinese tech titans Baidu, ByteDance, Tencent and Alibaba have ordered high-performance Nvidia chips worth $5 billion over fears that the U.S government will impose new set of export curbs, the Financial Times reported on Wednesday.

The internet giants have reportedely placed orders worth $1 billion to acquire about 100,000 A800 processors from Nvidia to be delivered in the current year and another $4 billion worth to be delivered in 2024.

The U.S government is likely to unveil new set of restriction that may preemptively target the export of Nvidia Corp’s A800 chip, which the semiconductor design firm designed after the earlier controls were announced.

Nvidia introduced A800 as a replacement chip with a slower processing speed for Chinese market after the U.S blocked China’s access to two of its high-end microchips including its leading-edge A100 processors.

A800 GPU works at 400 gigabytes per second and helped Nvidia overcome performance barrier set by the export restriction rules that it cannot sell chips with rates of 600 gigabytes per second and up(A100 operates at 600 gigabytes per second)

In September 2022, the Biden administration imposed a new license requirement on any products containing company's A100 and H100 integrated circuits used in the machine learning processes that enhance AI systems.

AI chip H100 were added to the U.S. export control list in order to address the possibility that the listed products may be routed to or utilised by a “military end use” or “military end user” in China

In a regulatory filing in September 2022, Nvidia said that the US government has told it to stop selling two of its chips, designed for artificial intelligence network, to Chinese companies.

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