The United States has expanded its restrictions on the export of high-tech artificial intelligence chips from NVIDIA and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), including to some countries in the Middle East.
NVIDIA claims that these restrictions, which specifically apply to the A100 and H100 chips used for machine learning tasks, will not have an immediate substantial impact on the company’s financial performance.
AMD has also received a letter outlining similar restrictions. According to Reuters, these measures are not expected to affect the company’s income.
Export restrictions are typically implemented by the United States for national security reasons. While a similar step was taken last year targeting China’s technological capabilities, it is unclear what risks are associated with exporting to Middle Eastern countries.
In a separate statement, NVIDIA stated that it is working with the U.S. government to address this issue.
In September of last year, AMD announced that it had received new licensing requirements that prohibited the export of its Mi250 artificial intelligence chips to China. Following this, NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel unveiled plans to create less powerful AI chips for export to the Chinese market.
It is worth noting that NVIDIA did not specify which countries in the Middle East are affected by the new restrictions. The majority of the company’s sales in the last quarter were made in the United States, China, and Taiwan.
It is important to highlight that without American AI microchips from companies such as NVIDIA and AMD, Chinese organizations will face challenges in effectively fulfilling image and speech recognition tasks that are crucial in military and other applications.
In October 2022, the Biden administration tightened export controls, including measures to restrict China’s access to certain semiconductor chips. This move aimed to limit Beijing’s technological and military advancements.
Countries such as Japan and the Netherlands have implemented similar rules earlier this year.