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Nvidia has dropped a blog post bomb on the Biden administration’s new AI chip export restrictions, announced earlier today and rumoured for some time. Nvidia’s vice president of government affairs, Ned Finkle, denounced the plans as “misguided” and an attempt to “rig” the market. Nvidia also sought to flatter the incoming President, crediting Trump for America’s “current strength and success in AI.”
Finkle’s blog post is borderline brutal in its dismissal of the new rules being imposed in the dying days of the Biden administration.
“The Biden Administration now seeks to restrict access to mainstream computing applications with its unprecedented and misguided ‘AI Diffusion’ rule, which threatens to derail innovation and economic growth worldwide,” Finkle said, describing the new rules as a “200+ page regulatory morass, drafted in secret and without proper legislative review.” Ouch.
He also claimed this “sweeping overreach” was an attempt to “rig market outcomes and stifle competition.” Moreover, Finkle says the rules, which are designed to prevent America’s adversaries from acquiring advanced AI technology, won’t work anyway.
“Rather than mitigate any threat, the new Biden rules would only weaken America’s global competitiveness, undermining the innovation that has kept the U.S. ahead,” he claimed.
For the record, the new rules are indeed pretty sweeping. They impose quotas on sales of AI GPUs to most countries in the world, the idea being to block Chinese efforts to circumvent earlier export controls on GPUs into China specifically. No question, this would all have a direct and substantial impact on Nvidia.
But Nvidia isn’t the only big tech entity upset by the new rules. Oracle Executive Vice President Ken Glueck said the new export regime “does more to achieve extreme regulatory overreach than protect US interests and those of our partners and allies,” adding that it, “practically enshrines the law of intended consequences and will cost the US critical technology leadership.”
For its part, the Biden administration has emphasized that 18 key US allies, including Australia, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, are subject to no restrictions at all and that, “chip orders with collective computation power up to roughly 1,700 advanced GPUs do not require a license and do not count against national chip caps.”
We also can’t help noticing how the blog post seemed to court favour with incoming President Donald Trump.
“The first Trump Administration laid the foundation for America’s current strength and success in AI, fostering an environment where U.S. industry could compete and win on merit without compromising national security. As a result, mainstream AI has become an integral part of every new application, driving economic growth, promoting U.S. interests and ensuring American leadership in cutting-edge technology,” Finkle said.
The vituperative language used by Finkle, particularly his accusation that the Biden administration is attempting to “rig” the market and calling the document itself a “morass” likewise feel like they’re straight out of the Donald Trump playbook of hyperbolic criticism, as opposed to the sort of measured critique of government policy you might normally expect from a major corporate entity.
The cynical interpretation here is that Nvidia is attempting to play on the perception that Trump is easily flattered. By giving Trump the credit for the current AI boom and also throwing in some Biden trash talking sweeteners, this interpretation would say, Nvidia hopes that Trump will go easy on any new import restrictions and maybe even immediately repeal these Biden rules.
After all, if Trump thinks he is responsible for the AI boom, he won’t want to kill it, right? And anything imposed by the Biden administration is bound to be something he’s opposed to? It’s a no brainer, no?
Perhaps. But whatever Nvidia’s actual intentions and motivations, this is a pretty eye-popping blog post and certainly not the usual bland, corporate fare. It will be fascinating to see how this all plays out, if the Trump administration does cancel these new rules and what, if anything, they’re replaced with.
Anywho, our immediate take on the new rules is that they won’t have much impact on gaming GPUs as opposed to AI chips, with the exception of the new RTX 5090 and the existing RTX 4090. We think everything below those cards should fall outside the rules, but we’ll update if that turns out not to be the case.
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Kurt Indovina
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