Jensen Huang, chief executive of Nvidia, said in an interview broadcasted by CCTV that his company will continue supplying competitive products for the Chinese market going forward.
Huang noted the importance of the Chinese market for Nvidia, emphasizing that it is crucial for the company to continue offering both datacenter and gaming products for the People's Republic. Yet, this is getting harder due to stricter export controls imposed by the U.S. gov't.
"We are going to continue to make significant effort to optimize our products that are compliant with the regulations and continue to serve the Chinese market," said Jensen Huang.
The Trump administration restricted sales of Nvidia's China-specific HGX H20 GPU for AI earlier this week, which made Nvidia write off $5.5 billion worth of inventory for the first quarter. As a result, Nvidia now must obtain an export license from the U.S. Department of Commerce to ship its H20 for the Chinese market. However, the government is unlikely to grant one as it reviews such license applications with a presumption of denial.
The U.S. government blamed H20's memory bandwidth and interconnect bandwidth for the restriction as both potentially enable usage of the processor inside supercomputers that can be used to develop weapons. It remains to be seen whether Nvidia develops a variant of H20 with lower memory bandwidth and fewer interconnects before the sweeping U.S. AI Diffusion Rule comes into effect in mid-May, though this is not a likely scenario.
In fact, it is completely unclear how Nvidia plans to 'optimize' its GPUs for the Chinese market from mid-May and onwards as the new export rules prohibit selling American AI GPUs to adversary countries like China and Russia. Nonetheless, it looks like Huang's company is trying to find a solution.
Meanwhile, Nvidia has criticized the AI Diffusion Rule saying that it would not stop development of Chinese AI technologies, but will likely encourage local companies like Biren and Huawei to develop their own processors, and, more importantly, standards.
"The increased restriction has impacted our company significantly," said Huang. "We have grown up in China in fact, and China has watched us grow in the last 30 years. Of course it is a very large market interactions and working and serving the Chinese companies here […] so it has made us both better and so we are going to continue to make significant effort to optimize our products that are compliant with the regulations and continue to serve the Chinese market."
