Jarred Walton
ONLY ABOUT A YEAR after the good ship RTX 4090 sailed out the doors, the US Department of Commerce has updated its export controls on various GPUs to prevent them from being sold to China. The RTX 4090 is now deemed too potent, due to its theoretical AI performance. The restrictions went into place on November 17, 2023, and the resulting chaos should come as little surprise.
The latest export restrictions on AI hardware define the limit as anything with a Total Processing Power (TPP) of 4,800 or higher. There’s a secondary factor of Processing Density (PD—TPP divided by die size in square-mm) that seeks to limit data center parts so that supercomputers can’t use lots of lower performance parts to make up the difference. Various GPUs, including the Nvidia H100, H800, A100, A800, L40, L4, and RTX 4090, can no longer be exported to China without a license—with a presumption of denial for license exceptions.