Written by Cláudio Afonso | info@claudio-afonso.com | LinkedIn | Twitter

The U.S. chips companies Nvidia and AMD closed lower on Thursday following the instructions from the U.S. Government to selling their AI-focused GPUs to China and Russia without a license.

iThe officials believe that Nvidia’s A100 and H100 “may be used in, or diverted to, a ‘military end use’ or ‘military end user’ in China and Russia,” the filing says. NVIDIA’s Drive Orin chips are currently being used by several automakers including Lucid Motors, Human Horizons, NIO, XPeng, Li Auto, and SAIC’s IM Motors all-electric lineup.

On Thursday’s session, Nvidia shares dropped 7.67% to $139.27 per share while AMD shares closed 2.99% lower at $82.33 per share.

In an SEC filing, NVIDIA said the U.S. Government “has imposed a new license requirement, effective immediately, for any future export to China (including Hong Kong) and Russia of the Company’s A100 and forthcoming H100 integrated circuits”.

“A license is required to export technology to support or develop covered products. The USG indicated that the new license requirement will 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. The Company does not sell products to customers in Russia,” the company added.

On March 2022, Lucid announced that its DreamDrive Pro advanced driver-assistance system (ADAS) will add new features in the future, building on NVIDIA DRIVE Hyperion technology.

Lucid’s DreamDrive Pro has a 32-sensor suite consisting of 14 cameras, 1 lidar, 5 radar, and 12 ultrasonic units and its dual-rail power system and proprietary Ethernet Ring offers an “especially high degree of redundancy for key systems, such as braking, steering, and sensors,” Lucid said earlier this year.

On Thursday, Lucid shares closed 0.26% higher at $15.38 per share after recovering from an early loss of 3.00% alongside the U.S. Futures.

The EV maker NIO has been working with NVIDIA since 2014, first on infotainment systems, and now, on software-defined vehicles and automated driving features. On January 9, 2021, NIO announced that started building new Adam supercomputer based on NVIDIA DRIVE Orin to power automated driving and AI features.

NIO’s ET5 and ET7 sedans rely on a centralized, high-performance compute architecture to power AI features and continuously receive upgrades over the air.

“The NIO Adam supercomputer is built on four DRIVE Orin SoCs, making it one of the most powerful platforms to run in a vehicle, achieving a total of more than 1,000 TOPS of performance,” NVIDIA recently said.

At the time, NIO CEO William Li said the cooperation between the companies “will accelerate the development of autonomous driving on smart vehicles” thankful to NVIDIA’s Orin processors which deliver 1,000+ trillion operations per second in production cars.

On Thursday, NIO shares closed 5.63% lower at $18.79 per share.

Also the Chinese automaker XPeng, when announced its new SUV G9 last November, unveiled that the model is built on “the high-performance compute of NVIDIA DRIVE Orin to deliver AI capabilities that are continuously upgraded with each over-the-air update”.

“Xpilot 4.0 is built on two NVIDIA DRIVE Orin systems-on-a-chip (SoC), achieving 508 trillion operations per second (TOPS). It uses an 8-million-pixel front-view camera and 2.9-million-pixel side-view cameras that cover front, rear, left and right views, as well as a highly integrated and expandable domain controller,” NVIDIA stated.

On Thursday, XPeng shares closed 6.43% lower at $17.33 per share.

In late 2020, Li Auto announced that it would develop its next generation of electric vehicles using the high-performance, energy-efficient NVIDIA DRIVE AGX Orin. The vehicles have been developed in collaboration with tier 1 supplier Desay SV featuring “advanced autonomous driving features, as well as extended battery range for truly intelligent mobility”.

Li Auto CTO Kai Wang commented, “By cooperating with NVIDIA, Li Auto can benefit from stronger performance and the energy-efficient compute power needed to deliver both advanced driving and fully autonomous driving solutions to market”.

On Thursday, Li Auto shares closed 3.02% lower at $27.90 per share.

Written by Cláudio Afonso | info@claudio-afonso.com | LinkedIn | Twitter