Washington’s latest tightening of its rules on tech exports to China may force U.S.-based Nvidia to cancel billions of dollars worth of planned deliveries this year.
The hit to Nvidia could amount to more than $5 billion, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.
Nvidia’s shares dropped by about 2.5% in early trading Wednesday before recovering later in the trading session. The company’s share price has been trending downwards since the U.S. updated its export control rules in mid-October to close a loophole that allowed companies like Nvidia and Intel to sell less-powerful AI related chips to China.
The Wall Street Journal report said that Nvidia had already completed its orders for this year, but was pushing to deliver some orders meant for 2024 before the new rules were scheduled to take effect in mid-November.
The restrictions were supposed were supposed to only come into play on Nov. 17, 30-days after the US first announced it. But in a filing on Oct. 24, Nvidia said it was informed that the rules were effective immediately and that it would affect shipments of Nvidia’s A100, A800, H100, H800, and L40S products. The 800 series chips were designed specifically for the Chinese market to circumvent the earlier iterations of the export control rules.
According to the report, China’s big tech firms like Alibaba, Bytedance, and Baidu had made large orders for 2024 and the amount exceeded $5 billion. Nvidia has been a beneficiary of the recent boom in AI-related products and the company’s value briefly crossed the $1 trillion mark in late-May.
A Nvidia spokesperson told Fortune that there has been high demand for its advanced chips and that it has been working to allocate these advanced chips to "our wide range of customers" in the U.S. and elsewhere. The spokesperson added that, "These new export controls will not have a meaningful impact in the near-term."
Eager for China business
The updated export restrictions also affect another major U.S. chipmaker, Intel. The company, like Nvidia, had designed chips that were made specifically for the Chinese market which met the earlier export restrictions.
Both these companies have been vocal about their desire to continue doing business with China.
In an interview in May, Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang suggested that shutting access to China for U.S. chipmakers could affect the U.S. ambitions for domestic chip manufacturing as the drop in demand would mean no one would need American fabs.
Similarly, Intel’s CEO Pat Gelsinger said during a visit to China earlier this year that the company’s presence there is “very important” and is one of Intel’s “most important markets”. China was Intel’s largest source of revenue last year according to the company’s 2022 annual report and it accounted for about 27% of the company’s total revenue.
But they are not the only two people in the tech sector that have spoken out about U.S. restrictions on China. Peter Wennink, the chief of the Dutch chip equipment maker ASML, warned earlier this year that the restrictions could result in Chinese firms making their own version of ASML’s cutting edge equipment that allows the manufacturing of the world’s most advanced chips.
And there may be hints that Chinese firms could be finding a way around restrictions. The Chinese device maker Huawei Technologies, which has been under sanctions since the Trump administration, released a new smartphone in late August with an advanced processor that’s just a few years behind cutting edge ones put out by the likes of TSMC.
