AMD says it'll jump through Uncle Sam's hoops to sell AI chips to China

After the US slapped restrictions on the sale of AI accelerators into China, Nvidia – and later Intel – launched nerfed versions of their silicon that could be shipped to the Middle Kingdom without Uncle Sam blowing his stack. Now AMD is working on an export-compliant processor of its own to sell overseas.

"China is a very important market for us, certainly across our portfolio, as we think about certainly the accelerator market," AMD CEO Lisa Su told analysts during the Ryzen maker's Q2 earnings call with Wall Street analysts on Tuesday.

"Our plan is to of course be fully compliant with US export controls, but we do believe there's an opportunity to develop a product for our customer set in China that is looking for AI solutions, and we'll continue to work in that direction."

What this accelerator might look like, Su didn't specify. However AMD, like Intel, has more than a few options for addressing the Chinese market. The American chip designer's current AI roadmap includes APUs, GPUs, FPGAs, and embedded accelerators like those found in Ryzen 7040 mobile processors.

But not for long. Within a month of the rules going into effect, Nvidia announced a borked version of its A100 that halved the memory and cut the interconnect bandwidth to two thirds. The graphics giant then launched the China-friendly H800, based on its Hopper architecture, earlier this year.