Earlier this week, the U.S. government lifted its ban on shipments of AMD’s Instinct MI308 and Nvidia’s H20 processors for AI to Chinese entities, which pleased the companies, their Chinese customers, and investors. However, John Moolenaar (R), the head of a House of Representatives panel on China, has sent a formal letter to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick criticizing the move and requesting a briefing to discuss the decision and future actions of the executive branch. There is an interesting part: he does not call for a ban on the said GPUs again, but to develop a new set of rules.
“I could not agree more, which is why I strongly supported the administration’s ban on H20 sales [to Chinese entities] — we must not allow U.S. companies to sell these vital artificial intelligence (AI) assets to Chinese entities,” the letter signed by John Moolenaar on behalf of the panel reads. “The H20 chip significantly outperforms anything Chinese chipmakers like Huawei can currently produce, particularly in high-bandwidth memory — a critical factor for AI inference workloads.”
H20 too good for China, for now
Nvidia’s H20 HGX GPU for AI applications was developed in response to the U.S. government’s ban on shipments of more powerful H100 and H800 GPUs to Chinese entities in late 2023. Although the H100 can be 3.3 – 6.69 times faster than cut-down H20 HGX with AI data formats, H20 HGX is a massively successful product in China not only because it outperforms the vast majority of AI processors that can be produced in volume domestically, but also because Chinese companies prefer to use Nvidia’s CUDA platform as it by far outclasses everything that Chinese companies have to offer.
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The congressman cited growing signs that Chinese companies are using Nvidia’s H20 processors in ways that may breach current export rules. Among other things, he mentioned Tencent’s reported use of Nvidia’s H20s to train its Hunyuan-Large model, which likely required over 200 PFLOPS of computing power. A cluster of this capability would meet the U.S. government’s definition of a supercomputer, placing it under restricted usage guidelines.