Nvidia is planning to release three new chips for China, according to local media reports, weeks after the US blocked it from selling two high-end artificial intelligence (AI) chips and one of its top gaming chips to Chinese firms. Nvidia declined to comment when asked about the report. Last month, the US AI chip giant said new export restrictions announced by Washington would block it from selling two of its modified advanced AI chips - the A800 and H800 - both of which were created for the Chinese market last year to comply with previous export rules. One of the company's top-of-the-line gaming chips, the L40S chip, which it announced in August, would also be affected, it said. On 24 October, Nvidia said those curbs would take immediate effect, as US regulators had sped up an original deadline.

The new RTX 4070 chip, which Nvidia will start shipping on Thursday, will cost $599, putting it near the middle of the company's range of graphics processing units (GPUs), which list for up to $1,600. The chip that it updates, the RTX 3060, is the fourth most popular gaming chip on the market, according to survey data in March from game distribution platform Steam. While Nvidia's data center chips for training artificial intelligence systems such as ChatGPT have powered the company's revenue growth in recent years, the company still got about a third of its $26.9 billion in fiscal 2023 revenue from gaming chips, though gaming revenue was down by 27%, dragged down by a sagging overall PC market. Nvidia's chips help PC video games render images on to high-resolution screens more quickly to make games look more realistic. The 4070 chips will be the cheapest available that use Nvidia's newest AI technology to do so.

Jensen Huang, the billionaire CEO of Nvidia, has made a fortune by supplying the hardware used for artificial-intelligence algorithms. He's now betting that AI is about to become an indispensable part of medicine. In the early 1990s, Huang recognized that the limitations of general-purpose computer chips and the rise of computer gaming would be likely to increase demand for specialized graphics processors. During the late '90s and 2000s, the company he cofounded found huge success making high-end graphics chips for gamers. More recently Huang and Nvidia have ridden a different technology wave, supplying the hardware used to train and run the deep-learning algorithms that have been key to a recent renaissance in artificial intelligence.

At a Gamescom 2018 press conference in Cologne, Germany, Nvidia rolled out its newest generation of gaming chips - the RTX 2070, RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti. They are based on its recently launched chip blueprint called "Turing," which Nvidia is also using for higher-priced chips announced last week for game designers, movie makers and other computer graphics professionals. The chips will range from $499 to $999 and will be available in retail stores starting Sept. 20, Chief Executive Jensen Huang said at the event. The biggest selling point of the gaming chips released on Monday is an improvement in so-called "real-time ray tracing," or the ability for the chip to simulate how light rays will bounce around in a visual scene, which helps video games and other computer graphics more closely resemble shadows and reflections in the real world. Part of how the new chip achieves high resolution graphics quickly is a special section of the chip that finishes most of the image but then uses artificial intelligence to guess what the unfinished pixels should look like.

At a Gamescom 2018 press conference in Cologne, Germany, Nvidia rolled out its newest generation of gaming chips - the RTX 2070, RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti. They are based on its recently launched chip blueprint called "Turing," which Nvidia is also using for higher-priced chips announced last week for game designers, movie makers and other computer graphics professionals. The chips will range from $499 to $999 and will be available in retail stores starting Sept. 20, Chief Executive Jensen Huang said at the event. The biggest selling point of the gaming chips released on Monday is an improvement in so-called "real-time ray tracing," or the ability for the chip to simulate how light rays will bounce around in a visual scene, which helps video games and other computer graphics more closely resemble shadows and reflections in the real world. Part of how the new chip achieves high resolution graphics quickly is a special section of the chip that finishes most of the image but then uses artificial intelligence to guess what the unfinished pixels should look like.