Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said recent US trade restrictions on sales of two of its AI chips to data center customers in China will still allow the company ample room to serve customers.
“The limits and license restrictions we’re affected by leave plenty of room to conduct business in China with partners and plenty of room to innovate and to continue to serve our customers there,” he said Wednesday during a Zoom call with hundreds of reporters during the company’s GTC Fall event.
In some extreme examples where customers have a special need to purchase those restricted chips, Nvidia will be able to seek a license from US trade officials, he said. “The vast majority of our customers are not affected by the specification” in the trade restriction.
Also, the restrictions recently put in place by the US Commerce Department are “no different” than other restrictions on CPUs. “CPUs have had restrictions for a very long time and yet CPUs are popularly used around the world and freely used around the world.”
For products in China based on Ampere and Hopper architectures, he added, “we have a very large envelope to innovate and serve our customers. So from that perspective, I’m not at all concerned.”
Hung described his general philosophy about trade restrictions during an era when national security is paramount and US officials worry that China could purchase vital technology and pass it along to Russia for use in its attack on Ukraine.
“There needs to be fair trade and needs to be national security,” Huang said. “That’s always a concern…nothing can be absolute and there have to be degrees…You can’t have no trade and no business, so it’s a matter of degrees.”
Huang explained his view of the US philosophy in making this latest trade restriction. “You could surmise that the goal is not to reduce or hamper our business,” he said. “The goal is to know who it is that would need capabilities above this limit and give the United States the opportunity to make decisions about whether that level of technology should be available others,” Huang said.
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The US trade restrictions on AI chips affects both Nvidia and AMD and came to light when Nvidia informed investors on Aug. 26 that it was told by the US government that a new license requirement was meant to address a risk that certain products would be “used in, or diverted to, a ‘military end use’ or “military end users’ in China and Russia.”
The restriction is expected to impact Nvidia A100 and H100 Tensor Core GPU chips for machine learning acceleration used in tasks like natural language processing conducted in data centers. It could affect up to $400 million in sales in the current fiscal quarter. AMD had said it would impact Instinct MI250 accelerator chips sales to China. Both companies had previously halted sales to Russia following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Nvidia later reported it had earned a partial reprieve and could allow exports of the A100 through March 1, 2023.
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