AMD Plans Cut-Down Instinct AI Accelerators For China To Comply With US Policies
AMD wants to compete with NVIDIA and others in China by offering cut-down AI GPUs to bypass US regulations.
During the recent Q2 earnings call, AMD's CEO, Lisa Su, highlighted the importance of AI for the company and acknowledged the immense demand from China. AMD's data center revenue for the previous quarter accounted for the largest share, and it is expected that the company will shift its focus toward artificial intelligence in the upcoming quarters. However, the major hindrance behind this move is the presence of US sanctions, which prevents companies like AMD and NVIDIA from doing business in "hostile" nations such as China.
AMD currently employs the Instinct MI250 & the upcoming MI300 in its high-end AI GPU arsenal, which features up to 153 Billion transistors & 192 GB HBM3 memory. While AMD can't sell the MI300 in China, the company plans to develop downgraded variants to comply with US policies. Here is what the AMD's CEO has to say on this:
China is a very important market for us, certainly across our portfolio, as we think about certainly the accelerator market. Our plan is to of course be fully compliant with U.S. Export controls, but we do believe there’s an opportunity to develop product for our customer set in China that is looking for AI solutions, and we’ll continue to work in that direction.
Dr. Lisa Su, AMD CEO (Q2 Earnings Call
NVIDIA is currently implementing this strategy, which is offering A800 and H800 GPUs in China These variants are also cut-downs of the original Hopper and Ampere GPUs and they offer relatively lower performance. Despite this fact, the GPUs are selling like hotcakes and have inflated to a tremendous price of USD 70,000. This move has undoubtedly worked for NVIDIA; hence, AMD
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