Don't need to give Uncle Sam any more reason to think kill switches are a good idea

Nvidia may have the Trump administration's blessing to resume shipments of its H20 AI accelerators to China, but in Beijing, government officials are now pressuring companies to use what they describe as less-advanced semiconductors.

According to a Bloomberg report citing unnamed persons familiar with the matter, Chinese authorities have sent letters to several firms discouraging the use of Nvidia's H20 GPUs for AI applications, particularly by those involved in government or national security-related work.

In April, the US Commerce Department halted sales of Nvidia's H20 — essentially a nerfed version of the company's more powerful H200 GPUs with reduced floating point performance and interconnect bandwidth. AMD's own China-spec GPU, the MI308, also saw a temporary block.

However, by July, Nvidia and AMD revealed that they'd reached a deal with the US government to resume shipments of the accelerators. This deal, it was revealed this week ...