US President Donald Trump’s administration has barred Nvidia Corp from selling its H20 chip in China, an escalation of Washington’s technology battle with Beijing that the company said would cost it billions of dollars and hamstring a product line it explicitly designed to comply with previous US curbs.
The US government on Monday informed Nvidia that the H20 would require a license to export to China “for the indefinite future.”
The rules address Washington’s concerns that “the covered products may be used in, or diverted to, a supercomputer in China,” the company said in a filing on Tuesday.
Photo: Ann Wang, Reuters
Nvidia said it would report about US$5.5 billion in write-downs during the current quarter, tied to inventory and commitments for the chip.
Nvidia’s shares yesterday fell 5.8 percent in premarket trading, while shares in rival chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) dropped 6.5 percent.
Asian tech giants also saw big declines. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) dropped 2.51 percent in Taipei, and testing equipment maker Advantest Co’s shares fell 6.7 percent and Disco Corp lost 7.6 percent in Tokyo. South Korean chipmakers Samsung Electronics Co and SK Hynix Inc were down by about 3 percent.
“An increase in US-China trade tensions prompted investors in the region to dump their stocks,” Moore Securities Investment Consulting Co (摩爾投顧) analyst Adam Lin (林漢偉) said, referring to the latest US Department of Commerce actions to impose export restrictions on Nvidia’s H20 and AMD’s MI308 chips, which are critical to artificial intelligence (AI) development.
“TSMC also remained concerned by the Trump administration’s threat to tariff semiconductors,” Lin said.
The new restrictions are among the clearest signs yet that Trump would stay the course on Washington’s efforts to limit China’s semiconductor and AI ambitions.
US officials first barred Nvidia and other AI chipmakers from selling their most advanced models to China in October 2022, over concerns that the technology could give Beijing a military edge. Since then, the China controls have ballooned to include an increasingly large set of semiconductor manufacturing tools, as well as a wider range of processors and high-bandwidth memory chips, which are essential for AI applications.
The news of the new controls came after US Senator Elizabeth Warren urged US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick to impose restrictions on exports of Nvidia’s H20 and other advanced AI chips to China.
“I write with great concern regarding reports that the Commerce Department has paused its plan to restrict the export of powerful advanced AI chips like Nvidia’s H20 to the People’s Republic of China,” Warren wrote in a letter posted on the Web site of the US Senate’s Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs.
Former US president Joe Biden had not included the H20 chips in controls his administration placed on exports of advanced AI chips, it said.
The restrictions follow Nvidia’s announcement on Monday that it would build up to US$500 billion of AI infrastructure in the US over the next four years.
Additional reporting by CNA and AP
HORMUZ ISSUE: The US president said he expected crude prices to drop at the end of the war, which he called a ‘minor excursion’ that could continue ‘for a little while’ The United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Kuwait started reducing oil production, as the near-closure of the crucial Strait of Hormuz ripples through energy markets and affects global supply. Abu Dhabi National Oil Co (ADNOC) is “managing offshore production levels to address storage requirements,” the company said in a statement, without giving details. Kuwait Petroleum Corp said it was lowering production at its oil fields and refineries after “Iranian threats against safe passage of ships through the Strait of Hormuz.” The war in the Middle East has all but closed Hormuz, the narrow waterway linking the Persian Gulf to the open seas,
Apple Inc increased iPhone production in India by about 53 percent last year and now makes a quarter of its marquee devices there, reflecting the US company’s efforts to avoid tariffs on China. The company assembled about 55 million iPhones in India last year, up from 36 million a year earlier, people familiar with the matter said, asking not to be named because the numbers aren’t public. Apple makes about 220 million to 230 million iPhones a year globally, with India’s share of the total increasing rapidly. Apple has accelerated its expansion in the world’s most populous country in recent years, bolstered
HEADWINDS: The company said it expects its computer business, as well as consumer electronics and communications segments to see revenue declines due to seasonality Pegatron Corp (和碩) yesterday said it aims to grow its artificial intelligence (AI) server revenue more than 10-fold this year from last year, driven by orders from neocloud solutions clients and large cloud service providers. The electronics manufacturing service provider said AI server revenue growth would be driven primarily by the Nvidia Corp GB300 server platform. Server shipments are expected to increase each quarter this year, with the second half likely to outperform the first half, it said. The AI server market is expected to broaden this year as more inference applications emerge, which would drive demand for system-on-chip, application-specific integrated circuits
PROJECTION: TSMC said it expects strong growth this year, with revenue in US dollars projected to grow by about 30 percent, outperforming the industry Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday reported consolidated sales last month reached NT$317.66 billion (US$9.98 billion), the highest ever for the month of February, driven by robust demand for chips built using the company’s advanced 3-nanometer (3nm) process. Last month’s figure was up 22.2 percent from a year earlier, but fell 20.8 percent from January, the world’s largest contract chipmaker said in a statement. For the first two months of the year, TSMC posted cumulative sales of NT$718.91 billion, up 29.9 percent from a year earlier. Analysts attributed the growth to sustained global demand for artificial intelligence (AI) products
RSS