Beijing does not want Nvidia H20s near sensitive government workloads (19459000)
Nvidia has the blessing of the Trump administration to resume shipments to China of its H20 AI Accelerators, but government officials in Beijing are now pressing companies to use semiconductors they call less-advanced. Bloomberg reported that Chinese authorities sent letters to a number of firms to discourage the use Nvidia H20 GPUs in AI applications. This was particularly true for those working on government or national security projects.
The US Commerce Department halted sales of Nvidia H20 in April — a nerfed-down version of Nvidia H200 GPUs that have reduced floating point performance. AMD’s MI308 China-spec GPU was also temporarily blocked.
By July, Nvidia revealed that it had reached an agreement with the US government for the accelerations to be re-shipped. This week, it was revealed that Uncle Sam would receive a 15 percent cut of the H20 and MI308 revenue.
On Monday, Trump suggested that Nvidia might be able to convince him to allow the shipment of a Blackwell accelerator in China, if its performance were “negatively” improved by 30-50 percent.
Since announcing plans for H20 shipments to resume in July, however, the chip has been a source controversy because the Chinese government has expressed concerns about the inclusion of location tracking technology, backdoors, or remote kill switches. Nvidia denies these allegations.
While Nvidia denies that such a capability exists today, it may be required to include such features in future. Legislation to mandate the inclusion location verification technology is already gaining momentum among lawmakers in both the US House of Representatives and Senate.
Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang previously dismissed that Chinese supercomputers or military computers would use Nvidia chips. Huang said in an interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria this summer that the Chinese military will not use his chips because Uncle Sam would never think of using theirs.
It is also worth noting the US government’s end-use rules prohibit China from using advanced semiconductors in their military supercomputers. However, enforcing these rules once the chips have left regulators’ control remains to be a challenge.
“The H20 is not a military product or for government infrastructure. China has an ample supply of domestic chips to meet its needs. It won’t and never has relied on American chips for government operations, just like the US government would not rely on chips from China,” Nvidia made a statement in a media release. Nvidia’s security chief pledges “no backdoors”
According to the letters that were allegedly sent by Chinese authorities, they recommend against using H20 for government and national security applications. Nvidia security boss pledges ‘no backdoors’
The letters Chinese authorities allegedly sent seem to reinforce this argument as they recommend avoiding the H20 for government or national security applications. (r)
