Nvidia becomes the first stateside chipmaker to launch a product in China that manages to clear strict U.S. export hurdles aimed at keeping high-end processors out of the territory. Computers with the new Nvidia chip, the A800, are already selling in China. Publicly traded Nvidia had been concerned the export limits could divert hundreds of millions of dollars from its bottom line. In October, U.S. regulators effectively banned shipments of advanced microchips and the equipment required to make them in order to bolster national security and thwart Chinese weaponization.

Advanced Micro Devices also has advanced chips on the export control list managed by the U.S. Commerce Department, according to Reuters. The Nvidia A800 can substitute for the A100. Both are GPUs, much in demand for AI and high-resolution graphics, and “can cost thousands of dollars each,” Reuters says.

“Two months after the U.S. choked off China’s access to two of Nvidia’s high-end microchips, the American semiconductor design giant unveiled a substitute with a reduced processing speed for its second-largest market,” is how TechCrunch contextualized it.

In August Nvidia said it had been ordered “to restrict sales of two AI acceleration chips to China — the A100 and the forthcoming H100, which let AI developers speed up their research and build more-advanced AI models,” reports CNET. “The order aimed to ‘address the risk that the covered products may be used in, or diverted to, a ‘military end use’ or ‘military end user’ in China and Russia,’ Nvidia said at the time.”

Specs for the A800 include chip-to-chip data transfer rates of 400 gigabytes per second (down from 600 GB per second on the A100), per Reuters, which says “the new rules restrict rates of 600 gigabytes per second and up.”

That represents a significant downgrade for data centers that rely on thousands of chips, CCS Insight analyst Wayne Lam tells Reuters.

Leading Chinese server manufacturers Inspur and H3C already have units with A800 chips rolling off the assembly lines, Reuters reports, and TechCrunch cites OmniSky as “another top China company” doing the same. Roughly $400 million in China sales hang in the balance for Nvidia’s 2023 fiscal Q3, ended October 31. The company will announce those results November 16.

The replacement chip is expected to smooth the transition and help lessen what could be a potential market share reduction as a result of the new export rules.