Aug 31 (Reuters) - Chip designer Nvidia Corp NVDA.O on Wednesday said that U.S. officials have ordered it to cease exporting two of its top computing chips for artificial intelligence work to China, hampering a business that accounted for $400 million in sales in the current quarter.
Nvidia said the ban, which affects its A100 and H100 chips designed to speed up machine learning tasks, could interfere with the completion of developing the H100, the company's flagship chip announced earlier this year. The disclosure sent share down about 3% in after-hours trading.
The announcement signals a major escalation of the technology tensions between the United States and China. Without American chips from companies like Nvidia and its rival Advanced Micro Devices AMD.O, Chinese organizations will be unable to cost-effectively carry out the kind of advanced computing used image and speech recognition, among many other tasks.