Compliant with export control regulations! Nvidia offers replacement chip H800 to Chinese customers

Nvidia said it had modified its flagship product into a version that can be legally exported to China.

U.S. regulators introduced rules last year that bar Nvidia from selling two of its most advanced chips, the A100 and the newer H100, to Chinese customers on national security grounds, Reuters reported. Such chips are critical to the development of generative artificial intelligence technologies.

Nvidia previously stated that it will provide a new advanced chip A800 in China, which complies with the new U.S. export control regulations and can replace the A100 that is restricted by the new regulations.

In addition to A100 replacement products, H100 replacement research and development has also made new progress recently. Nvidia said on Tuesday local time that it has developed a similar H100 chip for export to China. The new chip, called the H800, is being used by the cloud-computing units of Chinese tech companies including Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent, a company spokesman said.

The report pointed out that the rules surrounding artificial intelligence chips require the testing of those chips that have both powerful computing power and high data transmission rates between chips. Transfer speed is very important when training AI models on large amounts of data, because slower transfer rates mean more training time.

The main purpose of the H800 is to reduce the data transfer rate between chips to about half that of the flagship H100, the sources said. However, an Nvidia spokesperson declined to say how the H800 for the Chinese market differs from the H100, saying only that "our 800 series products are fully compliant with export control regulations."