Nvidia and AMD will not be able to sell GPUs to Russia and China due to the US ban

The US government has introduced new export licensing requirements that prohibit companies from selling high-tech products to Russia and China.

This became known from a statement filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) by Nvidia. The limitation applies to the NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core and H100 series GPUs, which provide several times the compute performance. The ban was introduced by US authorities on August 26 to eliminate the risk that products made with American technology could be used by Chinese and Russian companies for military purposes.

According to preliminary forecasts of Nvidia analysts, the company’s revenue for the third quarter will decrease to $5.9 billion. This is due to the fact that the company may lose about $400 million from Chinese users. The news caused Nvidia shares to fall 6.5% on Wednesday, August 31st. Nvidia has applied to regulators for a license that would allow the company to continue exporting its products to China, but management isn’t sure the US government will make an exception.

A spokesman for graphics processing company AMD, Nvidia’s main competitor, also said it had received new requirements for export licenses from the US Department of Commerce. The requirements apply to the MI250 chip used to work with artificial intelligence. However, AMD was quick to assure that the new requirements will not have a strong negative impact on its business.

Due to the sanctions against Russia imposed after the start of the military operation in Ukraine, the Japanese mining company SBI Crypto stopped working on the territory of the Russian Federation. In April, the US Treasury Department added to the sanctions list the Russian company BitRiver, which is engaged in the production of cryptocurrencies. However, the management of BitRiver called the actions of the US government unreasonable and intends to challenge them in court.