Nvidia designed cut-down A800 and H800 chips to keep selling into China under export limits

On 7 October 2022 the US Bureau of Industry and Security imposed sweeping export controls on advanced AI chips bound for China, defining the most capable accelerators by thresholds covering compute power and chip-to-chip interconnect bandwidth. Nvidia’s top data-center GPUs of the period exceeded the limits, so the company designed cut-down export variants - the A800 and later the H800 - to stay under the bandwidth ceiling and keep selling into China. Subsequent rules in October 2023 and December 2024 tightened the thresholds further, progressively closing those gaps.