(Yicai) Aug. 24 -- US restrictions barring sales of Nvidia’s graphics processing unit chips to data centers in China will “result in a permanent loss of an opportunity for the US industry” in terms of competitiveness and chances of taking the lead in the country’s huge markets, Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress said.

“Given the strength of demand for our products worldwide, we do not anticipate that additional export restrictions on our data center GPUs, if adopted, would have an immediate material impact to our financial results,” Kress said on Nvidia’s quarterly earnings conference call yesterday.

“However, over the long term, restrictions prohibiting the sale of our data center GPUs to China, if implemented, will result in a permanent loss of an opportunity for the US industry to compete and lead in one of the world's largest markets,” said Kress, who is also executive vice president.

She added that “China's demand was within the historical range of 20 percent to 25 percent of our data center revenue, including compute and networking solutions” in the three months ended July 31.

“During the quarter, major cloud service providers announced massive Nvidia H100 artificial intelligence infrastructures,” founder and Chief Executive Jensen Huang noted in a statement to accompany the California-based firm’s financial report.

“Leading enterprise IT system and software providers announced partnerships to bring Nvidia AI to every industry.” he said. “The race is on to adopt generative AI.”

Nvidia's revenue jumped 88 percent to USD13.5 billion in the fiscal second quarter from the previous three months and more than doubled from a year earlier. Income from the data center business soared 141 percent to USD10.3 billion on the prior quarter and surged 171 percent on an annual basis. 

Last September, the United States restricted Nvidia from exporting the H100 and A100, two leading GPUs used in artificial intelligence, to China. As a result, Chinese tech firms could only buy H800 and A800 GPUs with lower data transmission efficiency. 

Last month, chip-making giants such as Nvidia, Intel, and Qualcomm expressed their opposition to more tighter restrictions on China as they worry new limitations will sever their links with the country. That would damage their research, development, and investment and eventually weaken US dominance in chip-making, they noted.

Editor: Martin Kadiev