Previously, we have reported that the United States has imposed restrictions on the types of graphics cards that companies such as AMD, Intel and NVIDIA can sell to the Chinese market, especially those with powerful artificial intelligence processing capabilities.
Recently, the United States government has further tightened the ban by announcing an update to the graphics card specifications that are prohibited from being sold in that market, and some other markets.
Now, graphics cards with processing capabilities of 70 TFLOPS are banned from being sold in China and a few other select markets starting today, April 4, 2024. If you're still wondering what graphics cards America doesn't want sold in those markets, it's NVIDIA graphics cards GeForce RTX 4090 D developed specifically for that market.
This graphics card is reported to come with a processing capability of 73.5 TFLOPS, and to ensure that NVIDIA does not sell this graphics card in that country, they have further lowered the maximum TFLOPS value that is allowed to be sold in that country.
China is one of the largest markets for NVIDIA, although the gaming sector in that country is closely controlled by their government, these graphics cards were once reported to be modified by increasing the amount of RAM and used for other purposes such as the development of server machines specifically for artificial intelligence.