Biden Administration says it 'has not blocked' chip sales to Middle East
Justin Sullivan
Amid reports that the U.S. has expanded export curbs on Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) and AMD (NASDAQ:AMD) regarding chip sales to the Middle East, the Biden Administration has denied doing so.
A U.S. Department of Commerce spokesperson said on Thursday that it "has not blocked chip sales to the Middle East," according to Reuters.
The Commerce Department declined to comment if it had imposed new requirements on certain companies, the news outlet added.
AMD and Nvidia did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Seeking Alpha.
Despite those comments, Nvidia said that it had received additional information on licensing requirements.
"During the second quarter of fiscal year 2024, the [U.S. government] informed us of an additional licensing requirement for a subset of A100 and H100 products destined to certain customers and other regions, including some countries in the Middle East," Nvidia said in a 10-Q filing in conjunction with its most recent quarterly results.
On Wednesday, Reuters confirmed with a source familiar with the matter that AMD (AMD) is also impacted by the change.
Neither Nvidia nor AMD have said which countries they would require additional licensing requirements for. Syria and Iran are presently under near total export bans, according to the Department of Commerce.
In October 2022, the Commerce Department issued new export controls on chip export curbs to China.
Nvidia's (NVDA) A100 and H100 products are used for artificial intelligence purposes and to train large language models, like the one that is behind OpenAI's ChatGPT.
Earlier this month, it was reported that Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates had bought "thousands" of Nvidia (NVDA) graphics processing units to build artificial intelligence software.

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