U.S. President Donald Trump indicated he might permit Nvidia to sell cut-down versions of its Blackwell AI processors to Chinese entities, provided that the company cuts their performance significantly and shares 15% of revenue obtained from such transactions to the federal government, reports Bloomberg. The same can be applied to AMD's Instinct MI308.
"It is possible I would make a deal [on a] 'somewhat enhanced in a negative way — Blackwell' processor," Trump told reporters earlier today. "In other words, take 30% to 50% off of it."
Trump made his Blackwell-related remarks on the same occasion as he confirmed that he had finalized an unusual arrangement allowing Nvidia to sell its H20 HGX GPU to China-based entities if it pays 15% of the related sales revenue to the U.S. government. According to a source, AMD will match this requirement for its Instinct MI308 sales to China.
Cutting down the performance of Nvidia's B100, B200, or B300 GPU by 30% to 50% will still give Chinese entities formidable levels of performance. Today, the best thing Chinese companies can get is Nvidia's H20 HGX GPU that offers 148 FP16/BF16 TFLOPS and 296 FP8 TFLOPS for AI training and inference, respectively. However, a hypothetical B100 cut-down by 50% will give buyers 900 FP16/BF16 TFLOPS, 1.75 FP8 PFLOPS, and 3.5 FP4 PFLOPS for AI training and inference. No Chinese-made AI accelerator can match such rates.
Nvidia's H20 HGX is 3.3 – 6.69 times slower than the full-blown H100 in AI workloads with AI data formats, so it is a massively cut-down processor. Nvidia had to build it this way to meet Biden-era performance restrictions on AI and HPC processors imposed on exports of compute GPUs to China on national security grounds.
But if Trump's administration follows the U.S. President's proposal to cut down even the lowest-end data center-grade Blackwell by 50%, then it looks like both AMD and Nvidia will be able to ship much faster products to China. This might be good news for these companies, as they will be able to charge more for such hardware and increase their earnings. Of course, the U.S. government will also get its slice.
However, the possible decision will certainly not please China hardliners who are not happy that Nvidia sells Chinese companies its H20 HGX product and who would prefer to supply them something even slower.
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