According to the latest reports, NVIDIA is maximally accelerating the export of its GeForce RTX 4090 graphics to China. The reasons are obvious, the new sanctions imposed by the United States. In addition to affecting its flagship product for AI acceleration, its NVIDIA H800 designed to be sold only in China, the GeForce RTX 4090 will also be affected for this purpose.
Although the veto of the RTX 4090 in China is still unclear, NVIDIA prefers to get ahead of the problems
While the GeForce RTX 4090 will require an export license to ship to China starting November 17, it is still unknown if this will affect sales. Officially, this graphic is prohibited for professional use, but not for sale in the consumer market (gaming). But of course, this will not prevent local companies from purchasing these GPUs in bulk to replace them with AI-focused GPUs. That is why NVIDIA is already working on a possible total restriction. Regarding the local market, the RTX 4090 has seen its price skyrocket due to the opportunity to do business with AI companies.
In addition to China, this veto would be extended to other countries such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Vietnam. Therefore, possible access doors for China to acquire this hardware have also closed their doors. For now it is not clear what will happen, and NVIDIA has not decided to make an official statement. That is why we will have to wait until November 17 to finally know what will happen with this situation.
The money that NVIDIA is failing to earn in AI is going to Intel
On the other hand, according to the Korean Economic Daily newspaper , NVIDIA is seeing how other companies have begun to opt for Intel for AI acceleration. With hardware becoming increasingly difficult to obtain, and expected to worsen, along with rising prices, companies are already looking for a Plan B for NVIDIA hardware.
As an example, they give us Naver Corporation. This company is behind Naver, South Korea’s main search portal. Well, this Korean Google has replaced NVIDIA GPUs with Intel hardware due to shortages and price increases. This is very relevant if we take into account that AI is also used in its Naver Map software, yes, the Korean Google Maps. This company has stopped purchasing NVIDIA H800 GPUs after their price doubled from around $29,560 to $59,125.
Interestingly, the replacement of NVIDIA AI GPUs has been done by Intel CPUs. While a CPU is up to 10 times slower, there is a big difference. The latest Intel Xeon Sapphire Rapids are focused on AI acceleration. After months of testing, Naver Corporation has decided to use Intel CPUs for its new AI servers. According to Intel, its Sapphire Raids CPUs are up to 7 times faster than an AMD EPYC Genoa in AI.