To Be or Not To Be

Chipmaker AMD is in a dilemma. While they want to be fully compliant with the US export controls, they also don’t want to lose their grip on the Chinese market. Tough call.

Meanwhile, in an earnings call on Tuesday, AMD’s CEO Lisa Su expressed her concern for the company. 

Since last year, the US has been imposing back-to-back restrictions on semiconductor companies trying to prevent them from exporting high-performing GPUs to China. 

The ban on chip sales to Chinese customers prohibits the offering of advanced chips with high performance (at least 300 teraops) and fast interconnect speed (around 600 gigabytes per second). Nvidia's A100 chip is one such example, surpassing the performance requirement with 600 teraops and meeting the necessary interconnect speed.