The US government bans new NVIDIA graphics cards in China (and other countries). This time, it’s the Quadro range that falls under the US sanctions. Indeed, the RTX 6000 Ada is now affected!
RTX 6000 Ada: finito in China!
As a reminder, the RTX 6000 Ada is a professional card based on the AD102 GPU, a model similar to that of the RTX 4090. However, it comes in a more complete version, with 142 of the 144 active SMs. This makes for a large card with 18176 cuda cores.
Unlike the H100, H800, & Co, the card is not intended for AI-related activities, but rather for rendering tasks, 3D modeling and so on. However, the card’s performance places it among the sanctioned models. Incidentally, it’s not the only one to be affected by these new restrictions, as the A30, A40, L4, L40 and non-Ada RTX 6000 are also concerned. It would also appear that the RTX 3090/Ti are also affected, but that remains to be seen.
Note, however, that in the case of the 4090, the reseller may be granted an export license. In this case, we’re talking about a card with Total Processing Performance above 4800 TPP. So, in theory, the card is not totally banned from China, although it remains to be seen how often authorizations will be issued. Otherwise, in the datacenter sector, anything above 4800 TPP is automatically banned. Authorizations can be issued if performance does not exceed this limit, and if the performance density does not exceed 6!
Meanwhile, in China, as we reported here, there’s a rush to reach 4090. After the announcement of the card ban, prices began to soar. Right now, it’s not hard to find cards selling for 3/4x NVIDIA’s recommended retail price. Some models, such as the RTX 4090 Matrix, are selling for 5x the recommended retail price!
