Nvidia artificially limited A100 GPU performance in products sold to China due to US export controls.

Nvidia has significantly downgraded the performance of its popular A100 graphical processing unit (GPU) for data centers in response to US export restrictions targeting China. As The Wall Street Journal reports, the recent export restrictions imposed by the US government blocked the A100 from sale to the Chinese market, leaving Nvidia facing the prospect of losing hundreds of millions in sales to Chinese companies who use the A100 in servers, supercomputers, and for training artificial intelligence models.

To address this challenge, Nvidia created a solution by tweaking the A100 to lower its performance below the limit set by the US Commerce Department. The result is a new data center-grade GPU called the A800, which according to Nvidia, "meets the U.S. government's clear test for reduced export control and cannot be programmed to exceed it."

While the computational performance offered by the A800 is the same as the A100, Nvidia reduced the interconnect bandwidth from 600GB/s to 400GB/s, thereby limiting how much data can be sent to and received from other chips. This reduction ensures that Chinese companies will not be able to use the A800 for large-scale AI projects or for constructing supercomputers that challenge those in the top 100 list.

With China effectively cut off from the latest generations of chip manufacturing technology, the A800 is expected to prove very popular in the market. Even US companies such as Dell are anticipated to place orders for products the company sells within China.