(Bloomberg) — Nvidia Inc., the world’s most valuable chipmaker, is selling its top-of-the-line graphics products to video gamers after the U.S. government tightened restrictions on the products it can sell in China. A version with reduced functionality is being sold in China.
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The version of the GTX 4090 D chip sold on Nvidia’s China website has about 10% fewer processing cores than the 4090 sold in other countries.
“The GeForce RTX 4090 D is designed to comply with U.S. government export regulations and is available only at retail stores in China,” an Nvidia spokesperson said in an email.
CEO Jensen Huang said the company will produce versions of its market-leading products for China that comply with rules imposed by the Biden administration on exports to the country. The United States is restricting access to specialized chips in that market in an effort to slow China’s advances in artificial intelligence capabilities.
The company said it engaged “extensively” with the U.S. government during the development of its graphics products, which will be launched in January.
Compared to the 4090 sold elsewhere, the Chinese model also has fewer processing subunits to help accelerate artificial intelligence workloads, Nvidia said.
Read more: US tightens regulations aimed at keeping advanced chips out of China
U.S. officials, citing national security concerns, are more interested in Nvidia’s AI accelerators, currently topped by the H100. This type of chip is based on technology used in graphics cards and is the basis for the explosive adoption of AI-enabled hardware by large data center owners.
When U.S. export controls tightened in 2022, Nvidia introduced lower-performance versions of its chips for China. The US tightened its grip again in October by lowering performance standards further. Nvidia executives said they would rework products destined for the Asian country, the chip’s biggest market, to comply with the new rules.
As of 12:25 p.m. in New York, Nvidia shares were up less than 1% at $497.10. Its stock price has more than tripled this year, making Nvidia by far the best-performing semiconductor stock in 2023 and the industry’s first company with a market cap of $1 trillion.
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