Nvidia said the U.S. government told the company on Aug. 26, about a new license requirement for future exports to China, including Hong Kong, to reduce the risk that the products may be used by the Chinese military.
Nvidia said the restriction would affect the A100 and H100 products, which are graphics processing units sold to businesses.
“The license requirement also includes any future Nvidia integrated circuit achieving both peak performance and chip-to-chip I/O performance equal to or greater than thresholds that are roughly equivalent to the A100, as well as any system that includes those circuits,” the filing said.
The company expects that it could lose 400 million in potential sales in China in the current quarter after previously forecasting revenue of 5.9 billion. The new rule also applies to sales to Russia, but Nvidia said it doesn’t have paying customers there.
In recent years, the U.S. government has applied increasing export restrictions to chips made with U.S. technology because of fears that Chinese companies could use them for military purposes or steal trade secrets.
Nvidia said it was applying for a license to continue some Chinese exports but doesn’t know whether the U.S. government will grant an exemption.
“We are working with our customers in China to satisfy their planned or future purchases with alternative products and may seek licenses where replacements aren’t sufficient,” an Nvidia spokesperson told CNBC. “The only current products that the new licensing requirement applies to are A100, H100 and systems such as DGX that include them.”
NVIDIA A100
NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPU delivers unprecedented acceleration at every scale to power the world’s highest-performing elastic data centers for AI, data analytics, and HPC. Powered by the NVIDIA Ampere Architecture, A100 is the engine of the NVIDIA data center platform. A100 provides up to 20X higher performance over the prior generation and can be partitioned into seven GPU instances to dynamically adjust to shifting demands. Available in 40GB and 80GB memory versions, A100 80GB debuts the world’s fastest memory bandwidth at over 2 terabytes per second (TB/s) to run the largest models and datasets.
NVIDIA H100
基于 Hopper 架构的 NVIDIA H100,是“全球 AI 基础架构的新引擎”。
语音、对话、客服和推荐系统等 AI 应用正在推动数据中心设计领域的巨大变革。“AI 数据中心需要处理海量且持续的数据,以训练和完善 AI 模型,原始数据进来,经过提炼,然后智能输出——企业正在制造智能并运营大型 AI 工厂。” 这些工厂全天候密集运行,即便是质量上的小幅改进也能大幅增加客户参与和企业利润。
H100 将帮助这些工厂更快发展。这个 “庞大” 的 800 亿晶体管芯片采用了台积电的 4 纳米工艺制造而成。
“Hopper H100 是有史以来最大的一次性能飞跃——其大规模训练性能是 A100 的 9 倍,大型语言模型推理吞吐量是 A100 的 30 倍。”
H100 GPU 为加速大规模 AI 和 HPC 设定了新的标准,带来了六项突破性创新:
H100 的多项技术创新相结合,进一步扩大了 NVIDIA在 AI 推理和训练的领导地位,利用大规模 AI 模型实现了实时沉浸式应用。H100 将支持聊天机器人使用功能超强大的monolithic Transformer 语言模型 Megatron 530B,吞吐量比上一代产品高出 30 倍,同时满足实时对话式 AI 所需的次秒级延迟。利用 H100,研究人员和开发者能够训练庞大的模型,如包含 3950 亿个参数的混合专家模型,训练速度加速高达9倍,将训练时间从几周缩短到几天。