Nvidia starts selling rebranded A100 data center GPUs in China, bypasses US export bans

Some of the latest economic restrictions imposed on the Chinese economy by the US government include limitations on artificial intelligence computing hardware exports and these restrictions hurt China as much as some US-based producers like Nvidia, who are forced to conform to the new rules. In an effort to bypass the problems raised by such rules, Nvidia is now offering A800 compute GPUs exclusively to the Chinese market, Reuters reports.

Nvidia’s A100 and H100 compute GPUs were banned from the Chinese export lists last month, as the US government remains concerned over the Chinese military usage of compute hardware originating from the West. According to DigiTimes, this caused Nvidia to lose considerable market valuation and the company had to come up with a product specifically aimed at China in the form of the A800 variant, which is essentially the same with the original A100. However, in order to comply with the commercial restrictions, Nvidia had to reduce the speeds of the NVLink interconnect bus from 600 to 400 GB/s.

Videocardz informs that a Chinese company posted spec lists for the A100 GPUs now rebranded to A800 40 GB PCIe, A800 80 GB PCIe and A800 80 GB SXM. Except for the lower NVLInk bandwidth, the specs, including the compute performance and memory configurations, appear to be exactly the same from the original A100.

In its latest financial report, Nvidia mentioned that its sales to the Chinese data center market were estimated to turn in US$400 million, but these profits could not be realized last quarter because of the commercial restrictions. Team Green hopes to lessen the financial issues within the next quarter.

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