American chipmaker Nvidia got banned from selling its high-end chips to its Chinese clients but the company’s CEO Jensen Huang said on Wednesday that he continues to see a large market for Nvidia’s data center chips in China.
He made this known at a news conference after the company’s fall product launch. Huang said the restrictions disclosed earlier have specific thresholds for both the performance of a chip and the processor’s ability to connect to other chips.
He said that the rules leave “a large space for us” in the Chinese market.
“The vast majority of our customers are not affected by the specification,” Huang said.
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“So our expectation is that for the United States and also for China, we will have a large number of products that are architecturally compatible, that are within the limits, and that require no license at all.”
The restriction was announced by the company back on Sept. 1st when it stated that the US government has told it to stop selling its A100 and H100 chips to its Chinese clients which are expected to have an impact of about US$400 million in sales for the company in its current fiscal quarter.
The two products are Nvidia’s fastest chips and are used in data centers to speed up artificial intelligence tasks such as natural language processing.
During the Wednesday news conference, Huang added that both chips are part of larger chip lineups with a large number of products that can still be sold in the Chinese market.
He further added that Nvidia will seek licenses from the US government for its Chinese clients who wants its high-end chips.
“You could surmise that the goal is not to reduce or hamper our business. The goal is to know who it is that would need capabilities above this limit and give the United States the opportunity to make a decision about whether that level of technology should be available to others,” Huang said.
However, some Chinese companies including Hikvision recently made it known that it can still create more powerful surveillance cameras even without Nvidia’s GPU chips.
