US officials usually impose export controls for reasons of national security.
A wide range of rules announced last October signaled a significant escalation in the US crackdown on China’s technological capabilities, but it was not immediately clear what risks posed by exports to the Middle East.
Nvidia did not mention the names of the Middle East countries affected by the restrictions, but the company achieved most of its $ 13.5 billion in sales in the last fiscal quarter ending on July 30 from the United States, China and Taiwan.
The rest of the other countries combined accounted for about 13.9 percent of sales.
NVIDIA does not provide any information about its revenues from the Middle East.
“The United States government notified us of additional licensing requirements, during the second quarter of fiscal year 2024, for a subset of the A100 and H100 products intended for specific customers and other regions, including some countries in the Middle East,” the company added, in a disclosure to the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
NVIDIA said a year ago that US officials had asked it to stop exporting the same two chips used in artificial intelligence to China.
The move is seen as potentially slowing down Chinese companies’ ability to carry out advanced work such as image recognition.
Last year’s decisions came amid rising tensions over the fate of Taiwan, where chips are made for Nvidia and nearly every other major chip company.
The disclosure, published on August 28, did not include details of the countries to which the new restrictions were applied.
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