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Cerebras CEO puts Nvidia on blast for 'arming' China with top-tier GPUs
Thu 16 Nov 2023 // 10:18 UTCCerebras CEO Andrew Feldman has criticized Nvidia for its efforts to limbo dance under US semiconductor export limits to China, calling the behavior "un-American" and likening graphics processor titan to an AI arms dealer.
"I think Nvidia armed China single handedly," he told The Register. "If you think about Chinese AI capabilities … Nvidia gave them extraordinary amounts of Nvidia GPUs. There's no other way to look at it. It was legal, but that doesn't mean it doesn't carry a moral responsibility."
Like Nvidia, Cerebras designs processors for accelerating machine learning applications and other intense workloads; the startup's primary claim to fame is its unorthodox dinner-plate-sized chip dies.
Feldman's comments came in response to questions regarding US regulation of AI exports to regions of concern, namely China. In October, the Biden administration implemented stiffer performance caps on AI accelerators sold into the Middle Kingdom.
These rules effectively cut off Beijing from most American-designed high-end GPUs and accelerators used in AI and HPC applications. In response to the restrictions, Nvidia will reportedly launch a new round of chips for China that scrape in just under the US Commerce Department's speed limits on silicon.
From what we can tell these chips – the H20, H20, and L2 – are just slower versions of their full-fat siblings, as the die area remains the same among all of them. This makes sense as die area is, in addition to performance, a factor in determining which devices the rules apply to.
Efforts to regulate sales of American AI infrastructure to China have been an issue of concern for chip houses like Nvidia, which has issued several SEC filings warning investors of the potential fallout as a result of the rules.
