The White House has informed other federal agencies that it will not allow Nvidia to sell its new artificial intelligence chip B30A to China, according to US media reports on Friday (November 7).
The B30A is a scaled-down version of the high-end Blackwell chip specifically designed for the Chinese market. The news was first reported by “The Information” on Thursday (6th) citing sources familiar with the matter.
The B30A chip can be used to train large language models. It is reported that Nvidia has provided samples of the B30A chip to several Chinese customers. If efficiently deployed in large clusters, this chip can be used for training large language models, which many Chinese companies are in need of.
The report quoted two Nvidia employees as saying that Nvidia is currently working on modifying the design of the B30A chip, hoping that the US government will reconsider approval.
A spokesperson for Nvidia stated that they currently do not have any market share in the fiercely competitive data center computing market in China, and therefore, the B30A is not included in their revenue expectations.
Reuters reported on Wednesday that Beijing recently issued guidelines requiring all new data center projects receiving state funding to use domestically produced AI chips.
Sources said that Chinese regulatory agencies have recently ordered data centers with construction progress below 30% to dismantle all installed foreign chips or cancel purchase plans; for projects with more advanced progress, they will be reviewed one by one.
One source stated that due to this directive, some projects were halted before they even started, including a facility in a northwestern province that originally planned to deploy Nvidia chips.