It seems of madness, but in recent months, US authorities have detected increasingly crazy methods to skip the veto to the export of Nvidia chips to China.
Anecdotes range from hiding seafood cards to camouflage them in pregnant prostheses. Anthropic, one of the most critical voices with illegal traffic, describes it as «important threat» and asks for more controls, while Nvidia responds with sarcasm and accuses his rivals of «manufacturing stories» instead of focusing on innovating.
The reality is that, after years of restrictions that have not stopped strangling the company of Jensen Huang, both with Biden and Trump, the US administration has further hardened the rules: now not only the most powerful chips are prohibited, but any model adapted for China, such as the H20, needs a special permit to cross the border.
The problem that the US sees in China is that this country represents 13% of the global sales of Nvidia, about 17,000 million dollars the last fiscal year. And although the company has tried to overcome the restrictions designing ‘decaffein’ chips for the Chinese market, the latest novelty of the US government has left Nvidia with a blocked millionaire stock.
Meanwhile, US authorities already prepare laws to track the location of each chip after sale and block its operation if it ends in unauthorized hands. Congressman Bill Foster, a training physicist, says that the technology to do it already exists and that «it is not an imaginary future problem, it is a problem now.»
The US throws the closure and China accelerates its technological independence
Nvidia chips have become the basis of the most advanced artificial intelligence systems, from chatbots to military tools. Therefore, Washington fears that they end up in the hands of the Chinese army or promote projects such as Deepseek, China that already competes with the great US models.
The new restrictions, which enter into force this month, force Nvidia to redesign their chips to comply with the law and obtain the approval of the Department of Commerce before exporting any model to China.
The CEO, Jensen Huang, has traveled to Beijing to explain giants such as Alibaba, Bytedance or Tencent that The next ‘decaffess’ chips could be ready in June, but always under US surveillance.
The blow is hard for Nvidia, which assumes a cost of 5.5 billion dollars only in blocked inventory and purchase commitments.
The b side of the control: Is it possible to track each chip and stop smuggling?
As already mentioned, the new law prepared by the US Congress wants to go beyond customs: it proposes to trace the location of each chip of AI after sale and block them if they end where they should not. According to experts, the technology is already in the Nvidia and Google chips already use it in their data centers for security motifs.
But in practice, this is not as easy as they paint it, since smuggling not only depends on technical controls, but also a global network of intermediaries, falsifications and highly hidden secondary routes. The cases detected in Singapore, where servers with prohibited chips ended up in Chinese hands, make it quite clear how difficult it is to close all doors.
In addition, the pressure on NVIDIA is double: on the one hand, it must comply with the law and protect your business in the US; On the other, you cannot losing the Chinese marketwhere billions are still billed and fears that Huawei takes away the leadership.
Huawei has launched its 910c chip, designed to occupy the hole left by Nvidia
Precisely speaking of Huawei, the Ascend 910C seems to have been in the shade for years and now goes to the battlefield, becoming the great Chinese response to years of technological sanctions. Tencent, Alibaba and Bytedance, giants of the country who massively bought the NVIDIA H20, now look towards Huawei.
The truth is that the American play seems a shot in the foot. In a nutshell, forbidding Nvidia to sell her H20 chip in China, she has pushed local businesses to Huawei. The Ascend 910C, which combines two 910b processors in one, is already on its way to factories and data centers.
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Tags: NVIDIA, GPUS, GRAPHIC CARDS, UNITED STATES