The tech war between China and the United States has entered another strange phase after the Chinese government is now advising local companies not to use NVIDIA H20 artificial intelligence (AI) chips, especially for government-related projects, according to a Bloomberg report.
The notice states that NVIDIA H20 chips should be avoided in national security-related projects by government-owned and private firms. The directive was issued a week after NVIDIA issued a denial that their AI CPUs and GPUs have backdoors, kill switches and contain malware that allows them to be secretly accessed without the knowledge of the hardware owner.
Just yesterday, NVIDIA and AMD were allowed by the Trump administration to resume selling NVIDIA H20 and AMD MI308 AI chips to China with 15% of sales revenue going to the US government. This action has never been done before, with some industry players seeing it as paying a tribute if they want to be allowed to deal with customers.