The United States beefed up its effort to cut off the flow of advanced technology to China by instructing Nvidia Corp and Advanced Micro Devices to stop sending their flagship artificial intelligence chips there.
The regulations appear to focus on chips called GPUs with the most powerful computing capabilities, a critical but niche market with only two meaningful players, Nvidia and AMD. Their only potential rival - Intel Corp - is trying to break into the market but has not released competitive products. The U.S. Department of Commerce, which declined to comment on the specifics of whatever new rules it may be developing, appears to have targeted the effort narrowly.
Similarly, AMD said that only its most powerful MI250 chip - a version of which is being used at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, one of several U.S. supercomputing sites that supports nuclear weapons - is affected by the new requirement. Less powerful chips such as AMD's MI210 and below are not affected.