Hotspot Engine Project American chipmaker AMD has recently encountered obstacles from the United States**, and its artificial intelligence chip MI309 customized for the Chinese market has not been able to go smoothly**. According to anonymous people familiar with the matter, AMD had hoped to obtain approval from the U.S. Department of Commerce to provide the chip to Chinese customers, but the U.S. believed that the chip's performance was still too powerful to exceed U.S. export restrictions, so it required AMD to obtain a license from the U.S. Department of Commerce's Bureau of Industry and Security before it could be traded.
The MI309 is an AI processor designed by AMD specifically for the Chinese market and is part of the MI300 family. The latest AMD offering for AI and high-performance computing, the chips feature an advanced cDNA 3 architecture that delivers up to 8x the performance and 5x the efficiency while supporting large language models with up to 80 billion parameters. The performance of the Mi309 is lower than AMD's Mi300X and Mi300A, which are GPU-only and APU (CPU + GPU) versions, respectively, with more cores and cache.
AMD's goal is to expand its share of the global AI chip market by reducing the performance of the MI309 to make it compliant with U.S. export control regulations, allowing it to offer Chinese customers** the chip, competing fiercely with competitors such as Nvidia. It is reported that AMD's main customers include tech giants such as Meta, OpenAI and Microsoft, all of whom have said they will use AMD's MI300 series chips to develop and deploy artificial intelligence applications. AMD has also partnered with AI companies such as Hugging Face to provide hardware and software support.
However, the U.S.** is not buying AMD's plans, arguing that the Mi309 is still too powerful and could threaten the U.S.'s *** and economic interests. The United States has always been wary and hostile to China's scientific and technological development, and has imposed various restrictions and sanctions on China's chips, telecommunications, artificial intelligence and other fields in an attempt to curb China's technological rise. The U.S.** has also blacklisted Chinese AI companies, prohibiting them from doing business with U.S. businesses.
U.S. intervention could have serious consequences for AMD, not only affecting its business interests in China, but also hurting its competitiveness globally. China is one of the world's largest AI markets, with many AI companies and application scenarios, and there is a huge demand for AI chips. If AMD is unable to offer its AI chips to Chinese customers, it will lose a significant market opportunity while also giving competitors like Nvidia an advantage. In addition, U.S. intervention could also provoke a Chinese backlash, which could affect AMD's other businesses in China, such as PCs, game consoles, and servers.
1: amd hits u.s. roadblock in selling ai chip tailored for china - bloomberg
2: AMD goes head-to-head with NVIDIA to release the "most advanced AI accelerator" MI300 - Zhihu
3: amd instinct mi300x and mi300a accelerators announced - anandtech
4: meta, microsoft commit to buying amd’s new ai chip as nvidia alternative - cnbc
5: amd and hugging face partner to accelerate ai - amd