The U.S. has banned the export of NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 flagship graphics cards priced at $1600 or more to China

Together with the A800 and H800 chips, the US authorities have banned the export of even consumer graphics cards to China. So far, the decision applies only to NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090.

Here's What We Know

US officials believe that Chinese companies can create data centres based on several weak chips, getting the desired level of performance. This is classed as a threat to US national security.

In addition to the A100, A800, H100, H800, L40, L40S, US authorities are banning shipments of the GeForce RTX 4090. The graphics card is based on the Ada Lovelace generation AD102-300-A1 graphics chip. Since export restrictions are performance-based, it is possible that the threshold will be lowered again in the future.

The AD102-300-A1 processor is manufactured by TSMC using 5nm technology. It has 76.3 billion transistors with a density of 125.3 mm per square millimetre. The graphics card was unveiled in September 2022 and went on sale a few weeks after the announcement with prices starting at $1600.

Source: SEC