In an undated September 20, 2022 handout photo, Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang holds one of the company’s new RTX 4090 chips for computer gaming.
NVIDIA Inc. | via Reuters
US semiconductor giant Nvidia plans to release a modified version of its gaming processor in China with reduced performance to comply with US export regulations.
The product page on the Nvidia website for Chinese consumers lists the number of “CUDA” (Compute Unified Device Architecture) cores in the new Nvidia RTX 4090D, which a spokesperson says will be available in January, according to Reuters. , is shown to be 11% less than the version of the same chip. Items sold outside of China.
RTX is Nvidia’s line of advanced gaming GPUs, or graphics processing units. His CUDA architecture at the company is basically the GPU equivalent of a CPU core, which is a processing unit.
NVIDIA was not immediately available for comment in response to CNBC’s inquiries, but a company spokesperson told Reuters that the chip is “designed to be fully compliant with U.S. government export regulations.” .
NVIDIA “engaged extensively with the U.S. government” during the product’s development, a spokesperson said, according to Reuters.
The U.S. government has imposed export restrictions on China, preventing domestic companies from accessing some of American companies’ cutting-edge chips.
Export rules primarily target chips that enable AI applications, but also include gaming-specific processors, as many processors have potential uses in artificial intelligence.
According to an Oct. 17 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Nvidia RTX 4090 was included on a list of banned U.S. chips. Nvidia says on its website that the RTX 4090D chip leverages AI to improve performance.
Nvidia stock has soared in 2023, more than tripling in price since the beginning of the year. The company has benefited from a surge in demand for AI thanks to the huge buzz generated by OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot.