The bill, which aimed to regulate shipments of AI GPUs to adversaries and prioritize U.S. buyers, as proposed by U.S. senators earlier this week, made quite a splash in America. To a degree, Nvidia issued a statement claiming that the U.S. was, is, and will remain its primary market, implying that no regulations are needed for the company to serve America.
"The U.S. has always been and will continue to be our largest market," a statement sent to Tom's Hardware reads. "We never deprive American customers in order to serve the rest of the world. In trying to solve a problem that does not exist, the proposed bill would restrict competition worldwide in any industry that uses mainstream computing chips. While it may have good intentions, this bill is just another variation of the AI Diffusion Rule and would have similar effects on American leadership and the U.S. economy."
The new export rules would obviously apply even to older AI GPUs — assuming they are still in production, of course — like Nvidia's HGX H20 or L2 PCIe, which still meet the defined performance thresholds set by the Biden administration. Although Nvidia has claimed that H20 shipments to China do not interfere with the domestic supply of H100, H200, or Blackwell chips, the new legislation could significantly formalize such limitations on transactions in the future.