China is subject to technological barriers by the United States. As a result NVIDIA and AMD are prevented from selling their best artificial intelligence (AI) chips to China. To meet the needs of the market, NVIDIA launched the slower H800 chip so as not to violate the guidelines set by the American government.
Recently the US Secretary of Commerce, Gina Raimondo issued a warning to NVIDIA not to try to find a way around the barriers that have been imposed. According to him, any effort to produce a new AI chip based on the latest chip for the Chinese market will also be included in the list of hardware that is banned from sale the next day.
There are reports that NVIDIA will launch the HGX H20, L20, and L2 chips for China as alternative versions to the newly launched H200. Its launch has been delayed until next year to see what new guidelines allow it to be sold to the Chinese market.
China is currently rapidly developing locally designed chips to reduce dependence on foreign countries that impact the local industry. This is also to ensure that China will have a computing power of 300 exaFLOPs by 2025. Baidu, for example, has started to buy Huawei's AI 910B Ascend chip for their browsers.