NVIDIA's Chinese customers are getting limited editions of its GeForce RTX 4090 gaming chipset, as the company sells lower-cost versions of its top graphics chips to video gamers in the country after the US government tightened restrictions on the company's sales in the country. to implement.
The GeForce RTX 4090 D chipset sold on the company's Chinese website has approximately 10% fewer processor cores compared to GeForce RTX 4090 chips sold in other countries.
“The GeForce RTX 4090 D chip is designed to comply with US government export controls and is only available at retail stores in China,” Nvidia said.
The Chinese version of the product, made by Nvidia, complies with the Biden administration's regulations for exports to China.
The United States is restricting access to specialized chips in this market and is trying to slow progress in China's artificial intelligence capabilities.
The company said it worked closely with the US government to develop the graphics product, which will be available in January.
Compared to the GeForce RTX 4090 sold elsewhere, the GeForce RTX 4090 D has fewer subprocessor modules available for accelerating AI workloads.
The GeForce RTX 4090 D graphics processor features 14,592 CUDA cores with enhanced speeds of up to 2520MHz and 24GB of GDDR6X memory at 21Gbps.
US officials are interested in NVIDIA's AI accelerator business, which is currently dominated by the NVIDIA H100 chip.
These chips are based on the technology used in graphics cards and are considered the basis of artificial intelligence equipment for owners of large data centers.
Nvidia has launched a lower-power version of its chips for China after tightening US export rules in 2022.
The United States again took tough action in October to limit restrictions on benefits.
Nvidia responded by adjusting features of its chips shipped to Asian countries to make them compliant with the new rules.