NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 Now Twice As Expensive In China Following US Ban

wccftech.com:

NVIDIA's flagship GeForce RTX 4090 GPU has seen a huge price surge in China, pertaining to the recently imposed US restrictions, which have disrupted its supply.

The Biden government has decided to impose harsher sanctions on China, with the aim of reducing the influence of Chinese AI markets on the global landscape. The change in policy indicates that the US intends to thwart AI developments in China, and the most effective way they see is by blocking the supply of AI chips (especially GPUs) to the country. Now you might wonder how will this have an effect on consumer GPUs since they are often seen as a viable alternative to core AI products. Well, it looks like the first results of the ban are in and almost all Chinese retailers have increased prices of the flagship GeForce RTX 4090 GPUs.

Through the "ECCN 3A090 and 4A090" documents released by the US, any GPU/chip exceeding 600 GB/s memory bandwidth barrier, or 4800 TOPS (Tera Operations Per Second), will be restricted to export to China. This includes NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 4090, which doesn't seem like an intentional move, but the new trade policy does adversely affect the supply. The new decision has already seen impacts on the GPU market since the card has doubled in price.

Across major Chinese retail platforms, NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 4090 is being sold at around 26,000 RMB / USD $3550, which is around a 100% price bump compared to the official MSRP of 12999 RMB / USD $1777. Inventory levels might come to an all-time low, given that the US trade policies come into implementation. However, since NVIDIA means business every time, we could see a cut-down of the GeForce RTX 4090 variant entering the market as well, as a workaround to the new decision.

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