US authorities order company to suspend sale of AI chips to China.
Another episode in the escalating technological war between the US and China.
Sputnik - In yet another episode escalating in the technological war between the US and China, the administration of US President Joe Biden has ordered a halt to the sale of Artificial Intelligence (AI) chips to China.
The measure, according to the South China Morning Post, could harm the ability of Chinese companies to perform tasks such as image recognition.
Advanced chips have commercial uses, but they also have military computing applications, such as scanning satellite images for weapons or bases.
The information was confirmed by chip designer Nvidia Corp. The company reported that US authorities told it to stop exporting two key AI computing chips to China.
The interruption is causing a loss of US$400 million (R$2,07 billion) in sales this quarter for Nvidia, whose shares fell 4% on Wednesday (31).
The company said the ban, which affects its A100 and H100 chips designed to accelerate machine learning tasks, could interfere with the completion of development of the H100, the flagship chip announced by Nvidia this year.
Nvidia also reported that US authorities said the new rule "will address the risk that the covered products could be used or diverted for 'military end use' or 'military end user' in China."
The announcement signals a major escalation in the US crackdown on China's technological capabilities, as tensions simmer over the fate of Taiwan, where chips are manufactured for Nvidia and nearly every other major chip company.
Without American chips from companies like Nvidia and its rival Advanced Micro Devices, Chinese organizations will not be able to cost-effectively perform the type of advanced computing used for image and speech recognition, among many other tasks.
Image recognition and natural language processing are common in consumer applications, such as smartphones, which can answer queries and tag photos. They also have military uses, such as scanning satellite imagery for weapons or bases and filtering digital communications for intelligence gathering purposes.