What President Joe Biden's last-minute chip export restrictions mean for Nvidia
The Biden administration's Commerce Department released 168-pages of fresh regulations for the US semiconductor industry Monday that could drastically change Nvidia's year.
The new rules target exports of graphics processing units, the types of highly powerful chips made by Nvidia, and challenger AMD. Global data centers are filling up with GPUs and Nvidia has so far claimed an estimated 90% of that market share.
Highly complex chips like GPUs are largely manufactured in Taiwan, but most of the companies that design them are based in the US and so their products are within the Department of Commerce's jurisdiction.
"To enhance U.S. national security and economic strength, it is essential that we do not offshore this critical technology and that the world's AI runs on American rails," the White House's announcement reads, adding that advanced computing in the wrong hands can lead to "development of weapons of mass destruction, supporting powerful offensive cyber operations, and aiding human rights abuses, such as mass surveillance."
In response to previous export restrictions, Nvidia created a less powerful chip model just for the Chinese market to keep doing business there after the Biden administration changed the rules in 2022.
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