Nvidia Sees Another Opportunity Amid US Restrictions on Chip Sales to China

Nvidia Corp Chief Executive Jensen Huang still sees other opportunities in chip sales to China. (photo: nvidia.com)

JAKARTA - Nvidia Corp Chief Executive Jensen Huang stated on Wednesday, September 21 that he continues to see a large market for Nvidia's data center chips in China despite the US restricting exports of its two main chips to the country.

At a press conference following the company's fall product launch, Huang said that the US government restrictions announced earlier this month have specific thresholds for a chip's performance as well as the processor's ability to connect other chips.

He said the regulation left "a big room for us" in the Chinese market. "Most of our customers are not affected by the specifications," Huang said, quoted by Reuters.

"So our hope is that for the United States as well as China, we will have a large number of architecturally compatible products, which are within the limits and require no licensing at all," Huang said.

Nvidia said on Sept. 1 that it had been told by the US government to stop exporting its A100 and H100 chips to China, which could affect sales of up to $400 million for the company in the current fiscal quarter. Both products are Nvidia's fastest chips and are used in data centers to accelerate artificial intelligence tasks such as natural language processing.

At a press conference, Huang said the two chips were part of a larger chip lineup with "a large number of products" that could still be sold in China. Huang also said that Nvidia will seek licenses from the US government for Chinese customers who want its top chips.

"You can guess that the goal is not to reduce or hinder our business. The goal is to find out who needs capabilities above this limit and give the United States a chance to make decisions about whether that level of technology should be available to others," Huang said.