World War Fee Turns out Nvidia's not the only chip shop caught in the crossfire of Trump's tit-for-tat trade battle with China.
AMD revealed Wednesday it expects to book a charge of $800 million — about 16 percent of the House of Zen's Instinct revenues for fiscal 2024 — for inventory in shipments of its Instinct MI308 AI accelerators to China and other countries of concern, now blocked by newly implemented export controls.
As with Nvidia, Uncle Sam could end up overriding these rules on a case by case basis, and granting export licenses for MI308 orders into China that it approves of. However, as AMD points out in a filing with the US securities watchdog, the SEC, while it plans to apply for these licenses, "there is no assurance that licenses will be granted."
Until that happens, AMD is now stuck with a warehouse full of knee-capped GPUs as it waits to find out whether the Trump administration will green light its sales.
While it pales in comparison to the $5.5 billion in revenues Nvidia is likely out as a result of the licensing requirements impacting its own H20 processors, it offers a glimpse into just how big AMD's Instinct business has grown since the debut of the MI300X in late 2023.
While AMD is no stranger to GPUs, it's only recently that the Ryzen biz has pivoted from hardcore HPC parts, such as the Instinct MI250-series used in the United States' first exascale supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, to parts competitive with Nvidia for lower-precision AI applications.
When it launched, the MI300X boasted up to 32 percent higher performance in certain AI workloads compared to Nvidia's then-flagship the H100, along with more than double the memory and significantly greater bandwidth.
As we reported at the time, AMD had aimed to produce a version of that top-end processor that was compliant with America's restrictions on powerful US-designed silicon going into China – a variant we now know as the MI308 series – but beyond that, we don't know much about it.
Those export restrictions, imposed in late 2023, forced AMD to strip down the MI308's floating-point performance and interconnect bandwidth compared to the MI300X — likely putting the China-bound version in the same ballpark as Nvidia's H20.
We asked AMD for more information on the chip and the export controls limiting its sale outside the US. The outfit declined to comment beyond what's in its 8-K SEC filing.
- AMD says it'll jump through Uncle Sam's hoops to sell AI chips to China
- Trump derails Chinese H20 GPU sales, forcing Nvidia to eat $5.5B this quarter
- Nvidia joins made-in-America party, hopes to flog $500B in homegrown AI supers by 2029
- ASML hits targets but orders sag as Trump trolls markets
While AMD and Nvidia's ability to do business in China will be impaired for the foreseeable future, they may be able to rework their existing designs to limbo dance under the Commerce Department's latest performance limits on China-bound silicon.
It's also possible we'll see AMD reimagine the MI308 as a cut-rate inference part for nations where it's still legal, allowing them to recoup some of their investment. Nvidia did something similar with the A800. Initially designed to comply with interconnect bandwidth limits on GPUs sold in China, the part was reborn as a high-end workstation chip for machine-learning-heavy applications. ®
