US blocks sales of some AI chips to China as tech crackdown intensifies

The company on Wednesday said the ban, which affects its A100 and H100 chips designed to speed up machine learning tasks, could interfere with completion of developing the H100, the flagship chip Nvidia announced this year.

A spokesperson for rival AMD told Reuters the company had received new license requirements that will stop its MI250 artificial intelligence chips from being exported to China, but it believes its MI100 chips will not be affected. Without American chips from companies such as Nvidia and AMD, Chinese organisations will be unable to cost-effectively carry out the kind of advanced computing used for image and speech recognition, among many other tasks.

Image recognition and natural language processing are common in consumer applications like smartphones that can answer queries and tag photos. They also have military uses such as scouring satellite imagery for weapons or bases and filtering digital communications for intelligence-gathering purposes.