NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 4090D Gaming & H20 AI GPUs could soon be restricted from being imported to China as per the latest US trade regulations.
The Biden Administration Doesn’t Look To Give Space To GPU Vendors, New 70 TFLOPs Restriction To Further Limit AI & Gaming GPU Exports Such As NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 4090D & H20
[Update 4/4/2024] – NVIDIA has followed up with an official statement and confirmed that the APP restrictions have no impact on the H20 or the RTX 4090D GPUs.
Editor’s Note [Hassan Mujtaba]: Taking a deeper look at the 4A003 restriction, it only affects systems [e.g. an NVIDIA DGX workstation with multiple H100 GPUs] and not individual chips. Both of the aforementioned products, RTX 4090D and H20, are chips in that sense and the rules should have no impact on them. The weighted performance is also measured for 64-bit or larger floating point operations (FP64 and above) so both GPUs are way under that limit since their theoretical FP-64 compute is lower and within the limit advised in the restrictions.
US regulations imposed on GPU manufacturers were targeted toward preventing a technological transfer to hostile nations like China, and this meant banning the export of every single solution that met a certain performance threshold. This created a sense of panic among firms like NVIDIA and AMD, deprived of a crucial market. However, reports suggest that the Biden administration has decided to expand its regulations further, now coming for China-compliant products.
It is reported that the US government’s new restriction policy, effective by April 4, now comes for GPUs with a rated compute performance exceeding 70 TFLOPs, such as NVIDIA’s cut-down GeForce RTX 4090D Gaming and their H20 AI GPU. NVIDIA launched the GeForce RTX 4090D for gamers back in November 2023 while the company also started taking orders for the H20 AI GPUs back in February.
According to the ECCN 4A003, the mentioned products might require getting a license”, which means that exporting directly to China and other banned nations won’t be a possibility now. Here is how the new policy is listed in the SEC’s documents:
License is required (NLR) for computers with an “Adjusted Peak Performance” (“APP”) not exceeding 70 Weighted TeraFLOPS (WT) and for “electronic assemblies” described in 4A003.c that are not capable of exceeding an “Adjusted Peak Performance” (“APP”) exceeding 70 Weighted TeraFLOPS (WT) in aggregation.
– Security Exchange Commission
The above policy is to be implemented to export all electrical components, including CPUs and their respective NPUs. Now, the 70 TFLOP threshold means that NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 4090D GPU and their H20 AI GPU can’t be exported directly, and while we haven’t received a word about the reason for the licensing requirement, it could revolve around how the markets have tried to find “workarounds” with the China-compliant products, and a prime example is the “overclocking” of the GeForce RTX 4090D, which placed the GPU on-par with its original model in terms of performance.
We have reached out to NVIDIA for an official comment on this and will update the story as we receive new information. However, it’s conclusive to say that selling or exporting products from NVIDIA and others in markets like China won’t be easy moving ahead, and given that the Biden administration doesn’t look to provide any cushion to manufacturers, companies might have to resort to alternate strategies.
News Sources: Reuters