Explained | Why Nvidia tweaked its chip for China

The story so far: GPU and AI chip giant Nvidia on March 22 announced the release of a specially designed version of its advanced H100 chip that complied with U.S. export regulations. In September, Nvidia was ordered by officials to stop exporting two high-level chips - A100 and H100 - to Chinese customers due to concerns about the technology being used for military purposes in the future. Speaking about a newly released H100 GPU in March, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang had said that it could bring down large language model processing costs “by an order of magnitude.” Apart from artificial intelligence, the H100 also supports cloud computing. The Nvidia A100 costs about $10,000 and thousands of such chips are required in order to power AI processes such as Microsoft’s AI-enabled Bing chatbot.