Nvidia sees permanent loss of opportunities from China export curbs

(Reuters) -Nvidia’s financial chief said restrictions on exports of artificial intelligence chips to China “would result in a permanent loss of opportunities for the U.S. industry” though the company expected no immediate material impact.

U.S. officials are considering tightening an export control rule designed to slow the flow of AI chips to China by clamping down on the amount of computing power the chips can have, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Last October, Washington issued a sweeping set of rules aimed at stalling China’s chip industry while the United States pours billions of dollars in subsidies into its own. An update to those rules may come by late July, the two people said.

“Over the long term, restrictions prohibiting the sale of our datacenter graphic processing units to China, if implemented, would result in a permanent loss of opportunities for the U.S. industry to compete and lead in one of the world’s largest markets and impact on our future business and financial results,” Nvidia’s Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress said.

Shares of the company closed down 1.8% on Wednesday. So far this year, they have nearly tripled thanks to booming demand for AI chips.

In September, Nvidia had said U.S. officials asked the company to stop exporting two top computing chips for AI work to China. Nvidia then started offering a new advanced chip called the A800 in China to meet export control rules.

The new curbs being mulled by the U.S. would ban sale of even those chips designed specifically for Chinese customers, without a special U.S. export license, the Wall Street Journal has reported.

Other U.S. chipmakers have also been caught up in the U.S.-China technology spat.

China’s cyberspace regulator last month failed products from memory chipmaker Micron Technology in a security review and barred purchases by operators of key infrastructure.

Micron, which reported on Wednesday that quarterly revenue grew at a quicker clip than expected, has said it expects the ban to impact a low-double-digit percentage of its total revenue.

(Reporting by Chavi Mehta in Bengaluru and Sayantani Ghosh in San Francisco; Editing by Krishna Chandra Eluri and David Gregorio)