After the USA banned the export of RTX 4090 and other Nvidia GPUs to China, Chinese consumers looked for alternatives. RTX 4090 cards currently in the country are being dismantled and converted into artificial intelligence accelerators. Nvidia’s situation apparently benefits its main rival AMD, as sales are experiencing a significant increase.
AMD’s cards are up for grabs in China
According to Chinese sources, there is a significant increase in the sales of AMD’s RX 7900 XTX and 7900 XT cards, thanks to the RTX 4090 restrictions. AMD’s GPUs were not banned because they failed to achieve performance figures defined by the US Department of Commerce. AMD stated that the increasing demand for RX 7900 GPUs from Chinese partners was too high for them to meet, which has already led to a shortage. This shortage seems to be limited to Chinese manufacturers for now.
Therefore, the shortage in China has not been reflected in AMD graphics card prices in other countries for now. However, this may change in the future, especially if AMD cannot fix the problem before Q1 2024. While it seems unlikely that the supply will reach a sufficient level in the short term, the shortage is expected to include other consumers if the problem cannot be resolved by the first quarter.
The main point of export restrictions is to limit China’s progress in artificial intelligence and supercomputers. For this purpose, both Nvidia and AMD’s artificial intelligence chips were banned from being sold to China. Consumer-grade cards that rely on a certain amount of hardware power were also affected, like the RTX 4090. However, the RX 7900 XTX and 7900 XT were not affected by the US rules.
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