The Commerce Department has announced a softened position regarding Nvidia and other American companies allowing them to sell certain sophisticated high performance Graphics Processing Units to Chinese clients. The only condition is that Nvidia and others should not sell their most advanced products to China.

A week ago, U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo rebuked Nvidia for making swift alterations to its chips to allow selling its high-performance GPUs for AI and high-performance computing (HPC) applications to Chinese entities She said that specific export cut lines could be adjusted “the very next day.”

Nvidia, leads AI and HPC GPU markets, has the okay to sell some of its chips to commercial companies in China but not the top-of-the-line processors, such as the H100/H800, and products specially designed to meet the latest U.S. export regulations by making alterations that place them ‘just below the cutline’ defined in the current actions.  The concern expressed by some relates to the fact that the products in question may help China advance its military technology and if it gains advantage over the U.S. in AI, that could have national security ramifications. The Commerce Department has not addressed this issue yet. It is also unclear as to whether US military and technical strategists or the intelligence community have mapped the potential dangers from the softened position on selling these products to China,

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